Loose Leaf Notes

1. My two favorite words heard recently are brouhaha and jalopy.

2. I keep getting the Jubilee and the Jamboree mixed up. We have both in Floyd now.

3. I’ve been calling the Station, the newly renovated old building in town with apartments upstairs, the Dakota of Floyd.

4. While shopping this week I saw a bright gold bra with a smiley face on one of the cups.

5. My first trip to the Country Club pool resulted in some pictures of the tadpoles (a pre-beginner swim class), at least 13 of them.

6. Learn why I have a brand new pink blow up raft not yet out of the package HERE.

7. I bought four new cushion lawn chairs that unfortunately required some assembly but when we opened the box to put them together, we discovered there were no screws, bringing a whole new meaning to “we were screwed!”

8. I just got a message from the little voice within that my rice cooking on the stove is burning. Be right back.

9. The rice was stuck to the bottom of the pan but still eatable.

10. Speaking of pan, I was recently asked in a meme that I didn’t finish to name a fictitious character who made a lasting impression and my answer was Peter Pan.

11. Because I grew up on a tiny peninsula in between Boston and Cape Cod, I’m fortunate that I can visit my family and have a beach vacation at the same time.

12. Whenever I say Cape Cod, I think about when I was a young girl picking wild blueberries there with my grandmother, which leads to remembering a poem I wrote about baking a birthday blueberry pie for my son Josh … I feel my grandmother's wildness in me … navigating rough edges of coastline … as I steer the rolling pin like an oar … like an antique relic from her "roaring 20s" … it rocks back and forth … And especially this stanza: As I search the bowl of blueberries … for the bluest black ones … I remember 4 and 20 … blackbirds baked in a pie … and my son arranging battles … between blueberries and grapes … The blueberries always lost because he ate them …

13. I just this second remembered that Josh’s birthday is on July 10 and I may be away for his birthday, so now I’m going downstairs to find a card to send him.

More Thirteen Thursday fun HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

1. My corn is taller than a toddler.

2. If it was a kid it would be in the second grade.

3. “Does it Grow Corn?” is a Native American expression not so unlike “Walk your Talk,” one that I first heard from Medicine Man Sun Bear when he came to Floyd in the 80’s and I wrote about his visit in the Museletter.

4. I might as well be a car mechanic. My hands stay that stained and dirty from gardening all summer long.

5. I just went to write “Sesame Seeds” on my grocery list and wrote “Sesame Street” instead.

6. I haven’t seen a tomato horn worm since I was scared by them as a girl.

7. In case you missed it, the last paragraph in THIS post describes praying mantis sex.

8. Over the weekend I spent the good part of a day in compromising positions that involved ladders and dangling between branches off the edge of the porch while trimming the humongous forsythia bush in front of our house.

9. On my way to town for Floyd’s first annual jubilee festival, I imagined that friends there would ask me how I was doing and that I would answer, “As well as can be expected for someone who just spent an entire day tackling a bush twice as high and five times wider than me.” Of course I ended up answering “pretty good” when they really asked.

10. Because my car needs a new tie rod and makes knocking sounds when I go over bumps, I took the paved road route to town for the Jubilee. While driving I passed the house we lived in before this one (eighteen years ago) and saw a young boy in the yard planting something with his mother. It made me nostalgic for my sons as little boys.

11. While I was at the Jubilee and the Spoken Word Open Mic, my husband Joe spent a very fulfilling Father’s Day weekend helping my Asheville Potter Son with building projects in preparation for the Carolina Kiln Build on his compound in Marshall County. The day after he returned he went down the mountain to baby sit Bryce, my youngest son Dylan’s baby boy. Later, he thanked me for bringing him into such a wonderful family. (My kids were five and seven when Joe and I got together.)

12. I started a list of alternative answers to the question “How are you?” but I wrote them on the back of an envelope while driving and I can’t read my own writing now.

13. What would you do if you ran into one of THESE guys in the garden?

More 13 Thursday play HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. A couple of times this month when I was reading my blog comments I thought that my friend June from Spatter had visited but it was really just the month June recorded with each comment that I was reading.

2. I confess to not understanding Deal or No Deal and not wanting to.

3. I don’t even like the sound of it, but recently before I could get to the TV to shut it off, I noticed this beautiful 13 opportunity.

4. I have two stories in this month’s Natural Awakenings of Southwest Virginia, one on Floydfest and one on a pool player. Click on Monthly Magazines and June HERE for a real page turner. Notice how the pool ball in the second story has a 13 on it.

5. The only pool I’m familiar with is the one full of water.

6. Speaking of water, there’s been talk amongst Facebook friends in this rain drenched area about building an ark, paddling to the mailbox, and growing webbed feet.

7. Line for an imaginary novel that came to me while driving: With lipstick in hand, she shifted into gear and left a cloud of dust behind her.

8. Or maybe my life is being narrated.

9. Some lines come while I’m making comments on other people’s blogs, like this one about seasonal blooms: “The flowers come and go so fast it gives me whiplash.”

10. Every time I drive past the street in Floyd called “Needmore," I want to name a street “Need Less.”

11. Need less and needless have such different meanings but both make me think of the plural of needle.

12. 13 Thursday is a deal I can’t refuse.

13. Thanks to my favorite bird, the Wood Thrush, THIS is what my yard sounds like all summer.

More playing HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

1. I sent Mara and Kyla home with a bag full of garden lettuce when they were here playing Scrabble last week. Later, Mara texted me an email from her new phone saying, “Thanx 4 the lettuce.” I replied “are you alliterating it or just ating it?”

2. To which she texted back “lets see...lettuce leaves little to alliterate, lest you love lines like: "Look! Lettuce! Lord, how loose is this life.”

3. The “alliteration” line goes back to a poem Mara wrote and one I answered (called Poet’s Hotline), which starts … Her words land in poems … like eggs in a skillet … She makes them sizzle … She burns the butter … And ends with She’s alliterating lettuce … for a garden villanelle.

4. The highlight or my week happened when a young girl at the video store told me she liked my hair. Not only did the much appreciated compliment come at a time when I wasn’t liking my hair and needed to hear something nice, I was impressed that a young girl would even notice me.

5. The play HAIR is back. My sister Sherry and I saw the original in Boston back when many who were in it and practically everyone watching really was a hippie. Now they have actors to play them.

6. We grew up knowing that dirty things came in brown paper bags, but so did our school lunches.

7. In the 60’s when we weren’t “into” something, we really did say, “It’s not my bag,” which wasn’t any stranger than saying “It’s not up my alley.”

8. Do you remember the Unknown Comic and did you ever wonder who was under the paper bag he wore on his head? The answer is HERE.

9. BYOB used to mean "Bring Your Own Booze" but now, in light of the fact that we are drowning in non-biodegradable plastic bags and trees are cut down to make paper ones, it should mean "Bring Your Own Bag."

10. So many ways to say bag. There’s bag it… bag of wind…grab bag … doggie bag … bag lady … old bag …bag of bones …bag of tricks …. a mixed bag …left holding the bag … cat out of the bag …and half in the bag.

11. Ever since I learned that there’s a raft of plastic debris the size of Texas that has collected and is floating somewhere out in the Pacific, I started carrying my own reusable shopping bag in my pocketbook. (More HERE.)

12. Wearing plastic: Do you know how to tell if a garment of clothing is cotton or polyester? Clip off a piece from the underside and burn it with a match. If it’s cotton or some other natural fiber, it will burn to ash and disappear. If it’s polyester or some other unnatural material it burns into a hard plastic ball.

13. Most famous plastic bag HERE.

More 13 Thursday Players are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. Yesterday’s writer’s cramp is today’s carpal tunnel.

2. Sometimes I like to run my hand across the keyboard like Liberace playing piano.

3. Besides covering two stories, participating in a live radio interview about Bill McKibben’s visit to Floyd, and putting together the Museletter (a Floyd community newsletter) this past weekend, I managed to take in The Roanoke Symphony playing Motown while members of Cirque du Soleil performed!

4. My favorite part of the show was watching Conductor David Wiley. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a clip of the expressive conductor jumping and dancing in his bell bottom suit. THIS video clip, taken early on in the show, is of cirque performing to Led Zeppelin while an acrobat violinist joins the symphony from a trapeze.

5. I also saw the new YAC play MEN2B which concludes with a boy band dressed like the cartoon Beatles in Yellow Submarine singing … we all live in a yellow submarine … HERE.

6. My sister Sherry used to think Yellow Submarine was "Jealous of Marine."

7. She also thought “wind chill factor” was the “windshield factor.”

8. Better than a magic trick HERE.

9. But the best trick is when I mow our whole acre and ½ yard without the riding lawnmower breaking down once.

10. Because I started to have early signs of carpal tunnel, I’ve been alternating using my pc with my laptop, which means I’m using a jump drive to transfer work from one computer to the other, resulting in so many versions of changed and unchanged writing that I’ve frequently found myself utterly confused, which made me think of this quote by Lee Segall: A man with a watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.

11. Yesterday I got some body work done at the Chinese Medicine clinic. “I’m in good hands ... literally!” I told the practitioner who was massaging me.

12. The sun is rich like sugar. When I’ve get too much I feel full and have to go lie down.

13. If the sun is like sugar, the moon is salt. I like that too.

More playing 13 Thursday are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

1. A mother phoebe with a nest in the porch rafters has been using our picnic table for her runway while making feeding trips to her babies, as evidenced by the bird droppings I have to clean up everyday.

2. The above gives new meaning to the term “poop deck.”

3. “Pooh” is actually a name listed in some baby books. The meaning of the American originated name is listed on one baby name site as: Little One. A popular name for pets or stuffed animals or a pet name for humans. The popular storybook character "Winnie the Pooh" was named after an actual bear in the Winnipeg zoo named "Winnipeg Pooh"

4. In naval architecture, a poop deck is a deck that constitutes the roof of a cabin built in the aft (rear) part of the superstructure of a ship. The name originates from the French word for stern, la poupe, from Latin puppis. Thus the poop deck is technically called a stern deck, which in sailing ships was usually elevated as the roof of the stern or "after" cabin, also known as the "poop cabin.” ~Wikipedia

5. My husband used the term “Mucky Muck” recently. I had no idea it was a real term, where it came from, or what it meant. It reminds me of the first time I heard SOL (shit out of luck) and the person who used it was thought it was incredulous that I didn’t know what it meant.

6. For many years whenever any asked me ‘if you had to be an animal which would you be?’ I always answered a duck because they can fly and swim.

7. Have you heard of or seen THIS amazingly bright pink dolphin?

8. Was the word “chirp” invented just for birds?

9. How did Led Zeppelin get its name? According to the Wikianswers, when Jimmy Page was assembling the group, Keith Moon (drummer from The Who) got word of his plans and predicted the group would go down "like a lead balloon" (this is a common English expression). Bassist and keyboardist John Entwistle thought it would be "more like a lead zeppelin." Page took the phrase and decided to change the phrase because he said "those damned Americans will pronounce it lead (leed) zeppelin."

10. And the Beatles? The old “party line” that John Lennon used to give was: “A man came down on a flaming pie and said ‘let there be Beatles with an A’” A more orthodox explanation is it was inspired by Buddy Holly's backing band "the Crickets" and the misspelling was a play on words to describe a “beat” band.

11. I used to like to black out teeth and draw hair-dos and mustaches on faces in magazines, but I never drew anything like THESE, found at Pearl’s place.

12. When the rush of writing stops and the stories slow down I feel like a race horse in the stall expecting to find myself at the starting line with the start-up gun go off at any moment.

13. The birds are back … checking out the real estate … a high-rise nest … on my porch rafter … A one room shelter … inaccessible to cats … with southern exposure … and a landing deck … Find out how this poem ends HERE.

More Thirteen Thursdays are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. I check for blossoms on my flowers with the same vigilance that I check for blog comments.

2. My Thirteen Thursday last week was almost canceled due to lack of comments on Wednesday. It was the first time in the four years I’ve been blogging that an entry received no comments, so I considered leaving it up until it got one.

3. Getting no comments reminds me of going to a craft show to sell my jewelry (which I used to do) and making no sales.

4. Watching for comments is like watching the clock. It never moves when you’re looking it.

5. If a blogger quits blogging for lack of comments, do the lurkers feel bad?

6. After a whole day without a comment I had to send myself one for a test.

7. Sometimes while clicking my mouse I think about Dorothy clicking her red shoes to link back to Kansas.

6. Speaking of red, Byrce has “no comment” about THIS birthday present.

9. One of my birthday presents was a mouse (cordless) in a cat gift bag.

10. The post with no comments that I mentioned above actually got 2 before the week was done. See HERE

11. I wrote the following poem, titled “No Comment.” off the top of my head after someone gave me the prompt “button.”

I should know by now
how to button my lip
just go zip…
and close it.

12. It’s a good poem to end a poetry reading with, or a 13 Thursday list, but today I have something Beatlesque in mind.

13. And in the end the comments you take are equal to the comments you make

Seems like a lot to say for a blog post titled “No Comment.” Go HERE for more 13 Thursdays comments.

Posted by Colleen at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

1. Does Shebang mean the same thing as a kit and caboodle?

2. I recently became interested in the word “Shebang” and looked up its origins and found this: Known to go back at least to year 1862 (Walt Whitman), shebang is suspected to originate from the French word char-a-banc, which was a bus-like wagon with a lot of seats. Later, Mark Twain used it to describe a vehicle, as well as "any matter of present concern".

3. Which leads me to wonder who came up with the name Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and to saying things like “caboodles of noodles.”

4. I recently did an interview with a pizza pie maker while he was flipping dough. Now I can add him to this nursery rhyme I began last Thursday that now goes like this: “A year or so ago I would never have guessed that I’d be interviewing and writing about an opera singer, a cheesemaker, a toymaker, a pool player, a play director, a singer, a landscaper, a quilter, a publisher, an actor, a knitter, a market grower, a dairy farmer, and a baker!

5. The computer screen is a canvas to a writer like pizza dough is for a baker.

6. With all this clicking and typing I do, I can totally relate to a baseball player being taken out of the game so that he can rest his arm.

7. My latest online pet peeve is when I get sent somewhere I don’t want to go simply because my cursor rested on link or lightly brushed over one.

8. I just realized that Shebang would be a great name for a pizza with everything on it!

9. According to one artist’s interpretation, THIS is what a shebang looks like (found via google image).

10. And THIS is what I think a shebang should sound like.

11. If you’ve ever been to Niagara Falls you’ll understand our family joke when we say that our neighbor’s yard (he keeps it like a park) is like the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and ours is like the New York side.

12. “#!” Is another way to say Shebang. I kid you not. Look HERE.

13. When it comes to grandchildren, Bryce is the whole shebang! He’s one year old today.

More Thirteen Thursdays are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

1. A year or so ago I would never have guessed that I’d be interviewing and writing about an opera singer, a cheesemaker, a toymaker, and a pool player. It sounds like a jump rope song.

2. One thing I’ve learned about going on interviews for stories is that wearing my reading glasses in a holder around my neck while my camera is hanging there too is only asking for trouble.

3. My husband Joe has thick curly hair. When my kids were little and he needed a haircut, they would tease him by calling him “Ofra” Winfrey.

4. Now when he needs a haircut we just call him Rob Blagojevich.

5. I woke up yesterday morning and discovered three pens and three stalks of asparagus in my bathrobe pocket, which tells you a lot about who I am and what I do.

6. I recently learned that for several hundred years pool balls were made of ivory. The billiard industry realized that their supply of ivory was not sustainable because elephants that were being slaughtered just for their tusks were becoming endangered, so they challenged inventors with the incentive of a $10,000 prize to come up with an alternative material. The result was the invention of plastic.

7. Funny how we call a prolific weed invasive but if its a flower we call it naturalized.

8. My comment to Angoralady after reading a post about her garden: My next post will definitely be about my garden. I’ve got the bug, but I hope not the kind that eats veggies.

9. Then I read a post at Beautiful Layers about the author’s shop idea for her vintage and handmade clothes and said: You are definitely on the cutting edge (sewing pun intended).

10. I was listening to an NPR review of Bob Dylan’s latest album and was intrigued by one song titled "Hell's my wife's hometown.” It made me realize that my husband could say “Hull’s my wife’s hometown."

11. Always a lover of the short rhyme, my favorite jump rope song as a kid was: Mickey Mouse bought a house. He didn’t pay the rent so he got kicked out.

12. I have a hula hoop, a couple of kaleidoscopes, and a pair of pink kazoo lips. Now I’m starting to want a jump rope and some chalk.

13. And THIS makes me want to be a daycare teacher again.

Play more HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

1. Last month I reported being on the gum diet, how I picked up an old habit of chewing and snapping and getting a general jaw workout whenever I felt snacking.

2. But my bubble has burst: Not only have I not lost any weight, I just remembered why I quit chewing gum in the first place. It’s called aspartame.

3. Aspartame, the low-calorie chemical used to sweeten diet sodas and gum, has been linked to brain tumors and lymphoma in rodents. The Food and Drug Administration has certified the sweetener's safety, but reported side effects include dizziness, headaches, diarrhea, memory loss and mood changes and more.

4. Did you know that studies show that drinking diet sodas actually causes weight gain?

5. These days bad is good, hot means cool, and people spend a lot of time and expense on hairdos that look like they just woke up.

6. Why am I not surprised that aspartame was first introduced by Monsanto, the company that has been threatening our human right to grow food with their genetically modified seeds that can’t be saved and replanted. Read more about their evil plan to control the world’s food supply HERE.

7. I saw my first Indigo Bunting of the season and my dear friend Alwyn recently had a commentary published in the Roanoke Times titled Living in a World Without Songbirds: We live in a critical and defining moment in human and Earth history, but one that I believe offers us an opportunity to rethink our way of living and our relationship to nature. Simply patching up our sick economy with its focus on growth and consumerism is no solution because it ignores the fact that we cannot have prosperity on a planet whose resources are being drained by unlimited exploitation of its essential resources.

8. My 11 month old grandson is funny. He likes to try on hats and shoes and sometimes he puts hats on his feet and shoes on his head.

9. Attention seeking Grandmother gets too much botox HERE.

10. Kazoo lips aren’t the only trick I have up my sleeve or on my head for getting my grandson’s attention. Look if you dare HERE.

11. I once played the Jew’s harp (no relation to Judaism) back-up at a recording session for my friend Starroot. I think it was before CD’s.

12. Imagine making a living as a kazooist? Kazooist Barbara Stewart is a classically trained singer who has written a book on the kazoo, formed the "quartet" Kazoophony, performed at Carnegie Hall and appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

13. Soundtrack for this post is Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic, chosen for his use of the kazoo. Listen HERE.

More playing 13 Thursday HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

1. After 183 Thirteen Thursday’s I find myself wondering if there will ever come a Thursday when I have nothing left to say.

2. I also worry about the size of my blog. After four years of archives, I wonder how big can a blog get?

3. When I first started blogging I wrote this: Sometimes I wish the word “blog” didn’t sound so much like “blob” and remind me of the 1958 movie (The Blob) staring Steve McQueen where something falls from outer space and gets stuck on his arm and then grows and grows until it covers his body. It’s good for blogs to grow – more readers and posts everyday – right? It’s not going to take over my life – right?

4. Someone read in one of my recent 13 Thursday’s that my Obama bumper sticker was falling off my car and sent me a new one in the mail.

5. On Monday Joe and I woke up and discovered we had the same dream. We both dreamed of a dead body that we had forgotten about and when we remembered, even though we were innocent of wrong doing, we wondered how to explain it or dispose of it.

6. Early on in our relationship Joe and I frequently had the same dream. Once when I asked him a question in my sleep and he answered me out loud in real life (making perfect sense), it startled me awake.

7. Although I remember the first Earth Day in 1970, I had forgotten the circumstances of its origins, so I did a little research and found this on Wikipedia: Earth Day was conceived by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson (June 4, 1916 – July 3, 2005) after a trip he took to Santa Barbara right after that horrific oil spill off our coast in 1969. He was so outraged by what he saw that he went back to Washington and passed a bill designating April 22 as a national day to celebrate the earth. Many important laws were passed by the Congress in the wake of the 1970 Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act, wild lands and the ocean, and the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

8. We can also thank him for this: In 1970 Senator Nelson called for Congressional hearings on the safety of combined oral contraceptive pills, which were famously called "The Nelson Pill Hearings." As a result of the hearings, side-effect disclosure was required for the pill in patient inserts – the first such disclosure for a pharmaceutical drug.

9. Sean Penn in Rolling Stone on Bush leaving the White House and why his administration to be held accountable: I truly think the man should be imprisoned for the rest of his life. I know that sounds like some lefty thing, but I think the state of accountability is a sham. When Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, a lot of people were upset about it, but when Ford died, these Democrats who’d once criticized Ford for that pardon suddenly had these revisionist opinions: “We need to be unified.” But long term, do you think Bush and Cheney would have gone to the trough like they did if Nixon had gone to jail? No.

10. Favorite Bumper sticker, as coined by Alice Walker: When the axe came into the forest, the tree said, 'The handle is one of us.'"

11. I still remember how shocked I was when as a little girl I first learned that we had to pay for our land, our home, and even water. My next fall from grace and innocence happened in 1957 at the Hingham Loring Theater watching Bambi’s mother be shot.

12. My childhood home was taken by our town through eminent domain and burned to the ground. Like our green house at 10 ½ Spring Street, the sewage plant building that now stands in its place faces the Hull Village Cemetery, the place we played and sledded as kids before it was so filled up with gravestones, the place where two of my brothers and my father are now buried. More HERE.

13. About the same time that the first Earth Day was happening I was radicalized by Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book.” Of course, I paid for it.

More Thirteen Thursdays are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)

1. Earth Day in Floyd has a blog. Read all about it HERE.

2. Another new blog in my blogsphere: My Asheville potter son Josh is following in his mother’s footsteps as a documenter. He just started his own (collectively written) blog for the Carolina Kiln Build, an immersion onsite workshop for building two new kilns on his Marshall County property … coming soon. Check it out HERE.

3. Lately I feel like I’m two timing my blog whenever I spend a lot of time on Facebook.

4. I recently got involved for days posting a Facebook “Through the Years” retrospect photo album of my life from babyhood till now. If you liked the Easter bonnets HERE, you like some of THESE old photos.

5. Last month I saw a fascinating show on evolution vs. creationism on PBS. I was surprised to see how proven the theory of evolution actually is and was so in awe at the miraculous process of it that I asked myself ‘why can’ that be God or at least part of God's miraculous creation?’

6. A neuroscientist responds to the millions who would say that there shouldn't be a connection between God and science, a clip from the Tavis Smiley show that Joe and I watched this week HERE.

7. Other online germinations coming to bloom: An excerpted version of the Museletter – the 25 year old Floyd alter-native community forum built on back-to-the-land flower power – is now online HERE.

8. The computer screen is a writer’s empty canvas. Printers ink is the paint.

9. Draw your own powerful colorful flower HERE.

10. A quote we used in the Museletter this month: Every spring is the only spring - a perpetual astonishment. ~Ellis Peters.

11. “I wake up with blog entries like others wake up with dreams,” a recent one liner from a past TT that was posted on Blogations HERE.

12. Joe and I have been waiting for a very late check to be delivered, which brings a whole new meaning when it’s time for our daily walk and I say to him “let’s go CHECK the mail.”

13. I like to post a blog entry late at night and wake up to comments.

More Thirteen Thursday blooms are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)

1. I have never typed LOL (except for just now), but did type LMAO once. It was when I wrote that talk show host Bonnie Hunt had a 13 on her coffee cup and my sister Sherry told me in a comment that it was really a B for her name.

2. Poets are the nutty professors of words.

3. While in Blacksburg today I looked for my favorite word carved in the sidewalk on the corner of Draper and Jackson but found that it was worn to the point of being unrecognizable. What was my favorite word in cement? WORD.

5. Last weekend I provided care for a man with disabilities. I told him that after supper we would sit down and “catch up” but he heard Ketchup and got confused.

6. An alternative word for spring is boing.

7. I was recently scared by a dust ball the size of a gerbil under my phone table. Well, maybe the size of a mouse.

8. We just got a blast from the past, which means that winter blew and threw its weight around.

9. Speaking of blasts from the past, I find myself tuning in to those Time Life paid music advertisements as if they were favorite TV shows, especially the ones from the 60’s.

10. My Obama bumper sticker may be hanging off my bumper but I’m still attached to it. That’s what I told my husband when he asked me if he could just pull it off and I said ‘no.’

11. Not only has Obama begun to repair relationships with Muslims and rebuild ties with Turkey, he’s now the first U.S. president to hold Seder in the White House for Passover.

11. Some beautiful old country names for my collection, found in the local newspaper obituaries: Men: Vencil, Cephas, Sumpter, Gratton, Esker, Saford, Leston, Waller, Harless and Coy. Women: Arnedia, Nannie Belle, Hava, Hettie, Treva, Reneda, Lita, Daphina, and Essie.

12. And these words have not been taken: asofati, tenfig, cootat, veright, whan, dimpers (taken from blogger word verifications. I just know they have the potential to be real words).

13. In three words? To Obama? HERE.

More Thirteen Thursday words HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. I just got asked to a do a writing assignment via a Facebook Instant message.

2. So of course I asked the subject of the proposed interview in a Facebook Instant message if he want to meet me.

3. I named this week’s Thirteen Thursday for THIS video clip.

4. I recently read a list of “Top (111) reasons why I became a poet” by J. E. Peele on Pearl’s blog. My favorite reason to be a poet was: “I’ve arranged to have “orange” rhyme with hinge, flange, and strange.

5. I became a poet for the poetic license. It was either that or be a clown.

6. I like to sing the chorus to THIS song when I’m jumping on my trampoline.

7. I think I like that song because when I’m jumping I feel like a Mexican Jumping Bean.

8. I recently found myself telling someone that the Floyd Empty Bowls fundraiser was smashing success. No bad pun intended.

9. I was interviewing the manager of the Black Water Loft a couple of weeks ago, scribbling scrawling notes in my composition notebook, when she asked, “How many notebooks a year do you go through?”

10. She looked concerned about my messy note taking and said, “But you understand it all, right?” “In a week I won’t be able to read a word of it,” I answered. Truth is, sometimes I pull over on my drive home from an interview to review and rewrite some of my notes, because I can’t read my own writing and if I wait even a day to translate, I won’t remember what I wrote.

11. I just burned a pan on the stove and I hate the way the house smells almost as bad as I hate Deal or No Deal.

12. My son Josh has a nickname for the alcoholic panhandler he knows in Asheville. He calls him a “Mashie,” as in: “Mashie a question … can you spare a dollar.”

13. My brother John (who grew up in the era of “men don’t cry”) calls goose bumps “man tears.”

JUMP (as in Eddie Van Halen) on over to the Thirteen Thursday headquarters for more TT’s HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

1. This is my 180th Thirteen Thursday, so last week when I posted my 179th on Wednesday thinking it was Thursday, I blamed it on old age.

2. I also had jet lag. But I had no such excuse when I posted THIS 13 Thursday on Friday because on Thursday I forgot what day it was.

3. I wake up with blog entries like others wake up with dreams.

4. One day is along time in blog terms. Sometimes I get to thinking I’ll leave a post up for two days but then by the end of the day the post seems so old and I start thinking about something new.

5. On the first day of Spring I sent out a Jim and Dan Stories book order (the book I wrote about losing two brothers a month apart) to a woman whose last name was Sp(e)ring. You know who you are.

6. The house I grew up in was on Spring St. The number was 10 ½.

7. Peepers are the first sign of spring in my current neighborhood. THIS is what they sound like.

8. A spring peeper is a small chorus frog that lives in wetlands, marshes, and pond or swamp regions. Only males have the ability to make the loud high-pitched noise, and they use it to attract mates. On Martha's Vineyard, peepers are commonly called "pinkletinks"; in New Brunswick, Canada, they are called "tinkletoes." In parts of the American south they are (perhaps erroneously) referred to as "spring creepers." ~ Wikipedia

9. Listening to Barack Obama answer questions at Tuesday’s Press conference was music to my ears. It reminded me of the first time I heard Led Zeppelin (in 1969 at a little place called The Boston Tea Party) and how they would go off on multi-layered musical riffs that would utterly absorb me, and then bring it all back to the beginning, coming full circle in a way that surprised me, felt complete, and made sense.

10. Checking my Facebook account: Sometimes it feels too much like living on a street full of houses and looking out the window every time someone pulls up or drives away.

11. Today’s Soundtrack is HERE. I never realized how horns could sound so much like peepers.

12. After stumbling on a series of gorgeous spring flower photos on a blog entry titled “Take a Deep Breath Pollen Sufferers,” I left my comment: “Ah … (without the choo).”

13. What’s the first sign of spring where you live?

More Thirteen Thursday peepers are peeping HERE. My other TT's are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. In addition to Floyd’s new literary and art magazine. Floyd County Moonshine, we also now have the Republic of Floyd (featuring the Floyd Enquirer), which spoofsayer Tom Ryan has coined as a “literary enema.” Tom writes about the lighter side of Floyd with a bite. See HERE.

2. Talk Show Host Bonnie Hunt has a white mug with prominent black 13 printed on it. I wanted to get a picture of it off the TV. I was waiting for her to move it, because the number was off center, when my nephew Patrick pointed out the 13 on a book in my mother’s bookcase (pictured above), so I snapped that instead. My mother looked at me strange when I told her I collected 13’s but Patrick thought it was as normal as apple pie.

3. What do you do when you’re on a plane and the person sitting next to you spills his arms and elbows over into your seat and doesn’t seem to notice?

4. Why do we say ‘can I borrow a Kleenex or a cigarette?’ as if we will give it back?

5. Speaking of Kleenex: The doctor, who was wearing a white lab coat, spoke in an English accent, which gave his announcement a sense of formality and made the distance between his reality and mine seem more dramatic. A woman was with him, also in a white lab coat, holding a box of tissue. We were in the Intensive Care Unit, next to Dan’s room, and nurses in green scrub suits were walking by us. I was trying to figure out where I could go to get away from what he was telling me. I wondered why he hadn’t taken me to a private room to tell me such devastating news. Dan only had a 2% chance of living; they weren’t going to perform liver transplant surgery with those odds, he said. The words 2% were the equivalent of a death sentence, but he spoke them as though he were giving me the fat content of a carton of milk. ~ Read “A Box of Kleenex” in its entirety HERE.

6. There’s a backroom activity going on with this blog that most readers aren’t likely to be aware of. Several of my past posts on losing a loved one (written in 2005) continue to get comments from people who land on my site from related searches, continuing the ongoing conversation about grief and loss, which began when I first started blogging, after writing The Jim and Dan Stories, a book about losing my two brothers a month apart. See HERE and HERE.

7. There are 31 billion google searches every month. In 2006 it was 2.7 billion. A week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century. More "Did you Know?" HERE.

8. There were two oddball things I googled for my mother when I was recently visiting her in Hull, Massachusetts. One was “blade steak” (a cut of beef I got from her freezer and cooked for us and one which she said she grew up with), and the other was “giraffe.” She was telling me that a mother giraffe drops its baby while standing up (probably during the time she was complaining that the pain of shingles is worse than childbirth). We wanted to know if a giraffe lies down when it sleeps. It does.

9. Snacking at Gate B22 in Tennessee while waiting to board a plane to Greensboro, North Carolina, my bag of rye crisp crackers dumped over and crumbs spilled out in a big pile on the floor, making me wish that the travelers whizzing past me were rolling vacuum cleaners, but of course they were suitcases on wheels.

10. Written in the margins of a book above Greensboro: Surfing a wide open field of snow in an arctic sky of cumulus clouds, I need sunglasses. First blinded, then blind, I watch from the window as the plane’s sliver tip dives through the ghostly white in a wipe out. Immersed in an avalanche of breakers, there are no landmarks to show the way or any guarantee that we will come up for air, that we will ever see land again.

11. LOOK what I just found! Bonnie’s 13 mug turned the right way.

12. Tidbit borrowed from Kenju: My name was Susan Frame. I am a lawyer. I met and married Robert who is a banker. His surname is Mee. Now we are Sue Mee, a lawyer, and Rob Mee, a banker - ironic? I have taken no end of stick for this, believe me. More stranger than fiction names HERE.

13. While I was away Joe babysat for Bryce twice and sent me a few videos to hold me over. THIS is my favorite. Check out the tongue.

Safe travels to more 13 Thursdays HERE. My Thirteen Thursday archive is HERE. #178

Posted by Colleen at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)

1. Snow looks out of place on a sandy beach and some sand on beaches looks like snow.

2. Sometimes while driving downhill on the winding Blue Ridge Parkway, my car feels like a pin ball falling down the bottom of the game. Then, as if being flicked by a flipper, I’m back climbing up a hill.

3. I grew up playing pinball machines and still remember when the machine would TILT, sort of like a computer freezing up today. I also remember Pong and Pacman, two of the first video games.

4. Winter on Nantasket Beach: The ice cream truck is a snow plow.

5. The best place to pick up the internet in my mother’s house (where I’m helping out while she recovers from shingles) is in the middle of the bed in my father’s room. He passed away in 2005.

6. I had a dream that my brother Danny (who died in 2001) was dying again and we went to be by his side. He died in the afternoon but continued to move around and seem alive. We were told that it was just a reflex reaction, and even though he was supposedly dead we didn’t want to leave him while he was still acting alive. In real life we left my brother’s body too soon after he passed. He was technically dead buy I knew more was still going on.

7. I’m easily disorientated when out of my own surroundings. Packed in plastic bags for easy travel, my tryptophan capsules that I take when I can’t sleep look just like my multi-vitamins. All I have to do is take one tryptophan instead of a vitamin at breakfast and I’m napping by10 a.m.

8. The only thing I can figure as to why walking the beach in winter isn’t as much of a high as when I do it in summer is that in winter I have shoes on.

9. Stuff we’ve tried to ease the pain of my mother’s shingles: DMSO, apple cider vinegar, jewelweed lotion, and Benadryl lotion. Everything helps but nothing cures as well as time.

10. Curious about the two kinds of shingles, the disease and the roofing material, I did a little research and learned that the first shingles—the inflammatory skin disease caused by latent Chicken Pox virus – comes from words that mean girdle (cengles, single, chingle, cingulus) because of the rash that tends to extend around the middle of the body. Roofing shingles comes from scincle (1200), a small piece of wood, or shindalmos, a splinter.

11. A Simpson snowball fight game is HERE. My best score was 25.

12. My directorial debut: I wish snow shoveling was THIS easy.

13. On Monday the almost full March moon in Massachusetts looked like an oversized snow ball in a wintery mix but the next day when it warmed up and the snow melted the moon did not.

If you play 13 Thursday, honk HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

1. Last week my cursor starting typing everything backwards – from right to left. It felt like driving a car around that would only go in reverse.

2. Looking out the window after just waking up, I thought it had snowed before realizing that white tail deer fur was scattered all over the yard compliments of our dog Jasmine.

3. And then it really did snow, so much so that my flight to Boston was canceled.

4. This was a comment I left at Netchick’s Meet and Greet when my cursor was cursed: !! sdrawkcab gnihtyrve gnipyt si rosruc yM

5. Take the S out of CURSE and you have a CURE.

6. You can build a Ben and Jerry’s snowman HERE

7. But THIS one is better with 25 hats and more to play dress up with.

8. Speaking of ice cream: Occasionally there are perks that come with doing interviews for stories. In the past couple of years some of mine have included a CD, a facial, a concert ticket, and a cotton grocery bag. Lately it’s been dairy products. I was gifted some cheese while working on a story about a local cheese maker. That was followed by a story on a creamery in which Butter Crunch ice cream was involved.

9. The cheese maker story that I wrote for Natural Awakenings of Southwest can be read at their online site (click on magazines and March) complete with sound effects as you turn the page HERE.

10. When I was a kid I distinctly remember worrying about Peter Rabbit getting caught in Mr. McGregor's garden and about Frosty the Snowman melting. I was glad when SHE melted though.

11. As a child I was very taken by the Hans Christian Anderson story The Snow Queen. The combination of it being a deeply layered fairytale with the fact that it was the only story I remember my father reading aloud to me made it a formative experience, which is probably why it showed up later in poetry.

12. A broken piece of glass embedded in our sight … holds us hostage to bitterness … Shame cuts // as does a sharpened wit or pen … slash by slash the Druid’s Ogham … worn by time tells the story … He was saved from the Snow Queen … because somebody loved him … and because he finally was able to cry … out the glass // which was really a mirror … But his red shoes remain lost … down the river … I didn’t know then that my ancestor’s had no shoes … I didn’t learn that in school ~ From The School of Higher Learning, a 1999 poem about my Irish ancestry.

13. Unlike me THIS Loose Leaf Notes blogger is not very talkative.

Go HERE before they melt.

Posted by Colleen at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

1. Today while grocery shopping I learned for the first time what a BOGO Sale was.

2. I never say yes when a grocery bagger asks me if I want to keep my gum or chocolate out of the bag and tries to hand it to me. I’m not that desperate.

3. I also cringe when the deli clerk walks over to the counter from the meat cutter and holds up a piece of my turkey or ham, asking me if I approve of the cut. I can’t seem to ignore the fact that it is flesh being flapped around, and I wonder what the clerk didn’t understand about “sliced thin.”

4. It was out of character for me on Friday to go online and sign up for Oprah’s free Academy Award ticket for Sunday and chance to be on her show, but I’ve loved the watching the Oscars since I was a teenager and going is on my bucket list.

5. Even though I knew my odds for winning were one in a million, for the rest of the weekend I got a twinge of anxiety every time I thought of winning and having to pack a bag of the magnitude in a couple of hours.

6. Not only have I not had a gown since high school prom, I don’t own a pair of high heels.

7. I wondered what I would do with my hair if Oprah called, and then I remembered Mickey Rourke’s greasy hair at the Golden Globes and thought if he could go on TV like that then maybe my hair would pass.

8. My favorite Oscar acceptance speech was Sean’s Penn’s, but I also loved the way Kate Winslett asked her dad to whistle from the audience so she’d know where he was, and he did. It made me miss my dad.

9. Check out THIS mad lib Academy Award acceptance speech generator. Mine went something like this: Thank you! Oh! Thank you! I can hardly conjugate verbs! I feel so surgically enhanced! And this statue - it's so suspiciously phallic! Oh, thank you again! I just want everyone to secretly suspect that even in my wildest hallucinations, I never would have frantically prayed that this could ever liberate me from dinner theatre. I went on to thank my guru and The People Under the Stairs.

10. HERE’S the Roanoke Times write-up (in which I was briefly interviewed) of the Jacksonville Center’s Floyd Figures Artists’ Show, the group that has been drawing so many of us in the Floyd community for the past 25 years. The show inspired THIS poem.

11. I’ll never win an Academy Award, but I have won a "Be Kind to Animals" pin for a drawing I did in Elementary school art class, a quilted baby seat cover, a Crooked Road T-shirt, $100 for a poetry slam, and $50 at a Scrabble Tournament.

12. I was impressed with President Obama’s televised speech on Tuesday night but thought that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who gave the Republican response, sounded like he was reading a children’s book.

13. The weekend of the Academy Awards I actually did get a call that prompted me to pack a bag for a different kind of trip entirely. More on that soon …

Get your free 13 Thursdays HERE. Click and scroll HERE for more.

Posted by Colleen at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (33)

1. HERE’S my new paper shredder. I bet you can’t look at it and not laugh.

2. I left my wrist band from The Kind at the Pine Tavern last weekend on my wrist all weekend because it was pink, an appropriate accessory for Valentine’s Day and a reminder of going out dancing with my sweetheart, my husband Joe.

3. The next day Joe and I saw our mutual sweetheart, nine month old grandson Bryce. See how much fun that was HERE.

4. On Valentine’s Day morning I was putting two bright red apples in the fruit bowl and wondered why we don’t give our sweethearts a dozen red delicious apples instead of roses for Valentines Day.

5. Turn the name of your blog into a ee cummings poem HERE.

6. I call the photo above “The Royal Flush” or “Playing your cards right.”

7. Need a good pick-up line? Try THIS.

8. Were I live we still see unregistered pickup trucks with the words FARM USE painted where the license number usually is.

9. If you’re new here you might not know that apples play a romantic role in Joe’s and my relationship. When we met Joe said he liked my spirit right away. I was excited about my trunk full of just picked wild apples. Later, at our wedding he presented me with an apple instead of a ring (I got the ring later) and said it symbolized the fruit of the love that we tended.

10. I’m glad I still live where smoke comes out of chimneys. It looks so cozy and burning wood that Joe cuts makes us feel self-sufficient. I feel bad for new homes built without chimneys because I think we may be burning wood for heat again someday.

11. Ain’t that America? I only get 4 TV channels, so I’m only just now watching the Obama inaugural concert, youtube video by youtube video. I had heard the buzz about Bruce Springsteen and U2 but didn’t know that John Mellencamp played. John has the same birthday as my brother Dan (who loved his music) and he reminds me of Dan. I’ve like John since his "Hurt so Good" days and was happy to see he was invited to play.

12. What is the letter version of a mathematical equation? I think it could go something like this: LOVERS = Resolve + Solve + Love + Revolves + Evolves.

13. I think BUSY should be spelled BIZZY because when I get too BIZZY it makes me DIZZY.

Throw 13 kisses HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. I woke up early for the drive to Roanoke to baby-sit Bryce. Standing at the sink, filling the tea kettle with water, I thought my neighbor’s barn was on fire. I’m not used to seeing the sunrise.

2. Later in the week Joe went down to baby-sit. While he was there Bryce got a hold of Joe’s cell phone, pressed the right buttons and called me up! Twice!

3. I hate starting a new notebook. It’s like moving into a new house with everything I need packed away in boxes.

4. Ben and Jerry launched a new ice cream flavor for Obama’a inauguration called YES PECAN!

5. It’s been said (but I can’t verify the truth of it) that the also asked the public for ideas for flavors for the Bush Presidency. Some of my favorites are Nut’n Accomplished, Impeach Cobbler, Abu Grape, The Housing Crunch, Chunky Monkey in Chief, WMDelicious, Bloody Sundae, and Chocolate Chip On My Shoulder.

6. Yesterday I interviewed a dairy creamery owner that home delivers milk butter and ice cream. Some of their more intriguing ice cream flavors were Birthday Cake, Espresso, and Moo Tracks. I guess I was influenced by Obama’s ice cream. I got the Butter Pecan.

7. Have you heard about the new Pomegranate cell phone that can make a cup of coffee? Shop HERE.

8. I wonder if anyone has ever named a baby from a blogger word verification name. Some ideas seen recently are: Rombonan, Havari, Flundie, Korrae, Tostra, Sessula, Meralan, or Glasmabi.

9. The Pomegranate also doubles as a shaver, has a built in harmonica, can project a power point screen, and translates languages. See HERE

10. My blogger friend Patry and I are related through marriage. We had been visiting each other’s blog for a couple of years before we discovered that her niece's son is my sons' (half) brother.

11. I was excited to see that Patry recently posted a new blog after a five month absence, with her last post being titled “The Horrible and the Miserable.” She wrote, “After five months of looking at that dispiriting title, I figured it was about time to change the subject. I could talk about something else. Anything else. Sardines, for instance.” Patry, author of Liar’s Diary, has been battling a serious illness. Her new post is titled “Gratitude … Sardines … AND a health update.”

12. I’m always turned off by TV drug ads that show people on the drug living happy lives while the ad is quickly listing the drug’s side effects, some of which are death. The Gardasil ad for young girls is particularly catchy, but it’s recently been reported that a disproportionate number of girls have become ill from the vaccine and some have even died. Watch a CBS News clip on it HERE, and pass it on.

13. Something else that the advertisers aren’t telling you: The Pomegranate cell phone is REALLY an ad campaign for Nova Scotia.

More Thirteen Thursdays are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 7:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

1. THIS is not me.

2. Said to Joe on Saturday: I can’t wait to not watch the Super Bowl.

3. Michael 19 … Steven 21 … John 33 … How ironic that their deaths sound like bible verses … The hearses parked in the halls of the high school recruiting… From “For Eli,” a poem by slam poet/activist Andrea Gibson who will be reading at Hollins University Theater in Roanoke February 22 at 8 p.m. Hear her perform it HERE.

4. And THIS is really worth the watch, women through the ages morphing into each other.

5. What a strange world we live in. The first of February was Imbolc, Candlemas, St. Brigit’s Day, the Super Bowl and Groundhog Day. That’s almost as weird as having Martin Luther King Day shared with Confederate Generals, Jackson and Lee Day, which they used to do here in Virginia until recently.

6. I have radar for the # 13. I took the above photo from the TV while watching The Ellen Show last week. At the time Ellen was setting up some sort of audience participation game in honor of Super Bowl.

7. Fractals help me have faith in an afterlife. It’s a sacred geometry that just keeps on going. See HERE and don’t forget to watch long enough (half a minute) to see it in color.

8. A fractal is any pattern that reveals greater complexity as it is enlarged, showing the reality of 'worlds within worlds.’ The word was coined by French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975. Although the fractals he created were derived from mathematics, he emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models of many "rough" phenomena in the real world. Natural fractals include the shapes of mountains, coastlines and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and lungs; the clustering of galaxies; and Brownian motion. Fractals are found in human pursuits, such as music, painting, architecture, and stock market prices. ~ From the wikipedia.

9. Snowflakes are like fractals too. "They are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together.” ~ Unknown.

10. Even more miraculous and mysterious than fractals and snowflakes is the work of Japanese scientist Dr. Emoto who wrote the book The Hidden Message in Water, which describes how water molecules transform into beautiful crystallized shapes with loving thoughts and becomes ugly with hateful ones, as viewed under a microscope. Watch HERE.

11. The human body is 70% water. Imagine how our thoughts affect each other.

12. #3 in my December 4th Thirteen Thursday asks “If you had your own talk show, would you dress more like Oprah or Ellen?”

13. Thirteen Thursday is a fractal of sort, a meme (from the Greek to mimic) that keeps on going. See how it spreads out HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. The 2009 Sweetheart Valentine theme is a "Menu of Love" with a new series of candy conversation hearts that say, Honey Bun, Stir my Heart, Top Chef, and Yum Yum.

2. My friends Jayn and Emily and I put the February Museletter (our community newsletter) together on Monday. In honor of Valentine’s Day we decorated it with conversation heart stamps and used this quote by Dr. Seuss: “You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

3. I also found a quote by Dr. Seuss giving some good advice to writers: “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads.”

4. Here in NASCAR territory, people will sometimes ask, ‘who’s your driver?’ I call the picture below of my grandson Bryce “MY DRIVER.”

5. Joe and I were told about the Ripley’s Believe it or Not upside down house in Orlando. While on vacation there we found the Ripley’s Believe it or Not crooked house building and thought that must be it. Later, back at home, I discovered Ripley’s has both a crooked house and an upside down house on the same street. HERE'S the one we missed seeing in person.

6. Apparently Dr. Seuss (“the subversive fantasist who liberated children’s books from the conformist blahs of Dick and Jane”) was scolded by his art teacher for looking at his artwork upside down. I like to look at mine through squinted eyes.

7. You know how sometimes you look at a certain common word and it suddenly feels foreign or unreal? Sometimes when I read over something I wrote that’s been published a whole line can feel that way, and for a few seconds I feel a sense of disorientated panic.

8. These words are currently not taken: Monnize, Waffliest, Clundown, Cheris, Epleo, Unseepia, Agona, and Fugckabl. They are blogger verification near-words that just seem to be lacking descriptions and dictionary verification.

9. My car is being worked on, the drippy plumbing in my house is being fixed, and my dishwasher just bit the dust. I’m trying not to take it personally.

10. The Sun Magazine is my favorite magazine that I hardly ever read.

11. I like when you come back home from being away and for a brief few minutes you can look at your house with new eyes and see what you like and what you don’t like, a perspective that’s hard to get when you live in it day to day.

12. We perceive appearances and we begin to label them. Then we begin to take the label as reality. We fixate on the label and it becomes very real to us, but the appearances themselves have no label and no fixation. ~ excerpted from a Buddhist magazine I was reading when Joe and I were in Florida.

13. Remember the old bumper sticker that said “Question Authority.” I had one on my car that said “Question Reality.”

More 13 Thursdays are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. For me, reading and writing are so intertwined that I can’t read a book without a pen in hand to mark the lines I like, and I can’t write without reading each line out loud to hear how they sound.

2. Whether it is a crescent sliver or gloriously full, we know we are only observing a facet of the same spherical moon. ~ On aging – from Goddesses in Older Woman.

3. And ~ Think of yourself as the main character in a novel or motion picture that is being written by the choices you make or the roles you play and by whether you are committed to your own story.

4. A Huey Lewis drug: One of my favorite parts of road trip traveling is holding my face towards the sun while the car is zooming down the highway. With my eyes closed I see every color of the rainbow in strobe light fast motion as the sun flicks in and out of the trees.

5. The passage I’m using in meditation this week is by Lao Tzu: Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.

6. We’re on vacation in Florida but when I close my eyes to meditate it doesn’t matter what country, state or season I’m in.

7. Poolside soundtrack to go with #6 is THIS.

8. Number 7 is best sung dunked down low in the middle of the Jacuzzi where the acoustics are good.

9. My blog friend Gary sent me a link to THIS link because he thought I would like it. He was right!

10. Drinking from a plastic cup instead of glass is like eating hydrogenated margarine when you could be eating real butter.

11. While on vacation we’ve seen a glass house, a crooked house, and psychedelic Ferris wheel HERE.

12. Florida is a long way from Obama’s Inauguration in D.C. (and many degrees warmer). Although I didn’t attend, I watched it on TV, and I felt the same kind of solidarity when I voted with my body six years ago, marching on Washington on another cold January day to protest the starting of the Iraq War HERE.

13. Watch Joe and I being serenaded at Mama Della’s Italian restaurant in Portofino Bay at Universal Studios by all songs moon HERE.

Poolside is on the cool side today. More 13 Thursdays are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

1. Near the Florida border in Georgia, in a rustic whimsical setting, is a Treehouse Hostel that Joe and I just visited. The 130 acres of swampy forest and community reminds me of an Ewok village.

2. Inside a geometric dome wood building is the hostel common room where a wall is decorated with photos of past hostel managers and visitors. There are musical instruments for guests to play on around the community woodstove, which on this day was burning.

3. The last time I was this delighted was when I first saw wildcraft herbalist Susun Weed’s "Amusing Muse Museum" in Woodstock, New York, a room with wall to wall postcards and pictures of inspiring women.

4. Our tour guide was Ken (pictured left and right).

5. When Ken told us there were seven treehouses, I asked, “One for each dwarf?” He laughed.

6. A meditation bench overlooking a duck pond, a rope swing, a lake, and a labyrinth are all part of the hostel in the forest.

7. Even the bathhouse is beautiful. There’s also a craft room so that guests can explore their inner artist.

8. Arugula and greens were growing in the hostel garden. This is what Ken called a chicken tractor, a portable bottomless pen that can be moved around the property.

9. The glass house is considered sacred space, as is the sweat lodge, and a labyrinth.

10. The honeymoon treehouse was named for the couple who built it while on their honeymoon.

11. I want my own poetry mailbox. I love that the flag is up on this one.

12. If your cell phone rings while you’re at the treehouse hostel you’ll get tossed in the pool, Ken told us.

13. A garden bed.

More 13 Thursday's HERE and HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

1. I’m distracted from writing deadlines by a suitcase in my bedroom that I’ve been slowly filling with flower print warm weather clothes.

2. I’m irritated because it seems like we’ve all been gagged from speaking out in support of the Palestinian people.

3. I found myself watching people in my age category at the Golden Globe Awards to see who looks too good to be true.

4. By next Thursday I’ll be in a different state and I may actually be sleeping in a tree house.

5. Where was Jack Nicholson?

6. In the last two weeks I’ve written about Thailand, tourism, comedy, and cheese.

7. Some of the perks I’ve received recently while covering stories for The Floyd Press include a Crooked Road T-shirt I won at a fashion show, a facial, private opera singing, a CD, and now cheese.

8. I recently went to a goodbye party for a friend who is moving to Hawaii. I had key lime pie and pineapple juice.

9. Lately I’ve been part Wild Thing (doing whatever I want whenever) and part Second Child(hood) Thing, as evidenced by my taking up chewing and snapping gum again after twenty years of not doing it.

10. I think sunglasses look cool but I never could wear them because they make things too dark or unnatural.

11. It’s hard to be cool when you’re a child, when you’re falling in love, or when you’re getting older, which leaves such a small window of opportunity for being cool.

12. I forgot that I had my digital recorder in my pants pocket when it accidentally turned on and caused me to walk all over the house checking TVs and computers to see what was on before I discovered it was coming from me.

13. Bryce, meet your Poppa Joe HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

1. I played THIS song (another personal anthem of mine from the 60’s) on New Year’s Day and had myself a good cry. I was happy for the song’s ability to reach in deeply and make me remember and feel.

2. I also played THIS (the yin to the yang of the previous song) and it made me happy.

3. Hitting the nerve of sadness is like hitting an acupressure point on the body. It hurts and feels so good at the same time and wants to be poked and prodded to break up the stagnation.

4. Ever since I said I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions I keep coming up with some good ones. My latest is I want all the drippy faucets in my house to stop leaking.

5. I’m on the gum diet. That means at night when I have the urge to snack I chew and snap gum and get a real jaw work-out.

6. It’s not too late to make a New Year Resolution. If you can’t think of one, you can be assigned one by clicking HERE.

7. Playing those old Cat Stevens songs from Harold and Maude made me think of Ruth Gordon (who played Maude). I was curious about her and her thick accent, which I knew was familiar to me. A visit to Wikipedia revealed that she was from Quincy Massachusetts, the same city I was born in and 15 minutes from where I grew up.

8. My favorite color is the fiery magenta I see when I close my eyes and hold my face up towards the sun. It's a color I’ve been missing lately.

9. When my son Josh was seven he said, “Mom, people say when you close your eyes all you see is dark but it’s not true. I see all tie-dye stuff.”

10. World’s Tallest Snowman (something else I’ve been missing) is HERE.

11. My real New Year resolution is to clean up my virtual desk top from three years of pictures and video clips that have left little space on my hard drive. So that ought to keep me busy.

12. Now that I’ve been to Cirque du Soleil, the next show on my bucket list of entertainment is to see the amazing PILOBOLUS live. HERE’s an amazing tribute to New York that I watched them perform on Conan O’Brien last week.

13. And THIS is my kind of teapot poetry.

~ More Thirteen Thursday's HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. My blog is like the economy. It seems to be in a recession. Visits and comments, like retail sales, are down from last year.

2. In the evening when I’m upstairs typing on the computer and I even hear “Deal or No Deal” on TV, I have to go down and shut it off because I fear if I don’t Nielson will think I like the show and it will stay on air longer than it should.

3. I’m typing this on New Year’s Eve. I can see the moon through the trees. It looks like THIS poem.

4. “Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is to say, ‘I don’t want to’.” ~ Lao Tzu

5. Josh, his brother Skye, and I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button over the holidays, where Brad Pitt’s character is born old and becomes younger with the passing of time until he dies as a baby. I came away thinking that the premise wasn’t so much stranger than the fact that we watch our babies transform into adults and then they watching us grow into old people. Truth is at least as strange as fiction.

6. I’ve been to Time Square for New Years Eve, discovered it’s an overrated mostly drunken mob, and I never even got close to seeing the ball.

7. Today’s Soundtrack is THIS, which I first heard while driving in a tunnel in Boston under the influence of the 60’s.

8. This is really sad. LOOK at what the Thirteen Thursday Hub looks like now.

9. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Doug at Blue Ridge Muse has a list of the top 2008 Floyd stories HERE.

10. I spoke with Joe on the phone. He’s away, busy managing a five day New Year’s Teen Meditation Retreat. Tired and a little homesick, he said whenever he needs a boost he looks at a photo of our 7 month old grandson Bryce or remembers that Barack Obama is president.

11. And I am stuffed with facts…overweight with the nightly news…Poetry is the bell …that saves me from being…all-consumed ~ From “Political Prose is Hard Labor”

12. I once called poetry a sweet tinnitus ringing in my ears.

13. Speaking of ringing and bells, HERE is Bryce playing with some of his Christmas toys and navigating one in particular (it rings) that proves to be a handful for him. I video-taped this today (Wednesday) when it was 2008 and now it’s 2009. Happy New Year one and all!

Posted by Colleen at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)

1. Click HERE for my Virtual Christmas Message brought to you by the Auburn School Choir, of which my great-niece is a member.

2. My husband Joe, a counselor, recently expressed to me that he was glad our relationship was strong and that we didn’t need to see a counselor. “But you are a counselor,” I said, and then I told him whenever he gets overbooked and I start missing him, I’m just going to whine, “I need a counselor!”

3. Joe is the Program Director for Earthsong Teen Meditation Retreats and has been super busy lately getting ready for a New Year’s retreat. The Natural Awakenings Magazine of Southwest Virginia (whose publisher lives in Floyd and who I wrote about HERE) just published a story on it. You can read it HERE.

4. Summer camp is an all-American tradition for many teens. But what kind of camp teaches kindness as part of its curriculum, or instructs campers to disconnect from their high-tech, high paced lives in order to sit still and listen? ~ Excerpt from the story I did on the summer teen retreat for the Floyd Press. The rest can be read HERE.

5. Hey, LOOK what $12,000 spent on Christmas lights can get you.

6. I recently began to wonder if Bob Dylan ever recorded a Christmas song and if he did how would he pull one off, so I googled around and found THIS, close enough I suppose.

7. Two of my favorite creative artists and influences have come together. Natalie Goldberg (author of Writing Down the Bones and more) has done a documentary on Bob Dylan called Tangled up in Bob. She traveled to the town where Bob grew up and interviewed those who knew him and draws on generational commonalities between her upbringing and his HERE.

8. My great-niece Samantha is not pictured in the photo above but a family friend named Molly who I was wasn’t expecting to see is on the far right. Unfortunately, Samantha was never visible enough for me to get a good shot of, but HERE she is front-and-center performing a different sort of talent.

9. The end of an era: First Michele ended her longstanding Meet and Greet (soon after Netchick decided to host it). Now, after three years, The Thirteen Thursday Meme Hub is closing down. I posted my first Thirteen Thursday on October 10, 2005 when it was hosted by its founder Leanne, and this is my 165th one. Even though the site is closing down, I’ll continue to post 13 on Thursday because stream of consciousness list writing suits my writing style and doing so helps me tie up each week. I also get a lot of material from my TT lists and sometimes read a selection of one-liners taken from them at Spoken Word Night Open Mic, which is as close to stand up comedy as I get.

10. When our dog is finding and eating too much raw deer meat during hunting season it gives her diarrhea, which is when I start calling her a “bad ass.”

11. I forgot to mention that after dancing to The Kind at the Pine Tavern awhile back, Joe and I went to our car and found a single serving box of Kellogg cereal on the windshield. I’m still wondering about that how and why it came to be there, especially when I go into my pantry and see it on the shelf, which is where it is now.

12. I recently realized that the word USE is in the word MUSE, which gives me encouragement that the Muse is available to be used rather than playing hard to get. The MMMM sound (mother, mana, milk, and manifestation) preceding the word USE also speaks to my sense of divined support for my creativity.

13. This is my very favorite interactive Christmas card, well worth the click HERE.

And so ... as my current answering machine messages says: Leave your Kris Kringle after the Jingle.

Posted by Colleen at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

1. Who let the air out of Christmas? Driving to Christiansburg on Monday I passed a yard full of plastic blow-up Christmas ornaments deflated and spread out on the law. It looked like a Christmas massacre.

2. I was on my way to visit my dear friend Alwyn for a Christmas tea. Alwyn is an 83 year old Jewish-born Quaker who prefers to keep Christmas simple. When I arrived and told her I had a gift for her, she said, “No chachka this year.” I learned that chachka is a Jewish word for “collected stuff.”

3. I gave her one of THESE and she was thrilled with it. I also brought a belated birthday gift for her November birthday, a homemade apple crisp, which we proceeded to eat. We both agreed that both gifts did not fall in the chachka category.

4. First there was the shoe bomber and now the shoe thrower. Apparently President Bush is as good ducking flying shoes, to the tune of a size 10, as he is at ducking questions. If you haven’t seen the clip that looks like a bit from a Three Stooges movie yet, see it HERE.

5. So I guess I and half-a-million others who marched on Washington before the Iraq invasion to try and stop it might have gotten more attention if we had taken off our shoes and thrown them at the White House.

6. Last year my poem about wanting President Bush to have a dream like the one that Ebenezer Scrooge was aired on The Monitor, a Pacifica radio affiliate in Houston. You can hear it HERE (after the music lead-in). The story of how it was written and how I came to read it on Pacifica is HERE.

7. While driving, I listened to NPR and caught some of Diane Rehm’s interview with Les Standiford, author of The Man Who Invented Christmas, which is about Charles Dickens, author of A Christmas Carol, the story of redemption and the true spirit of Christmas, which awakened the humanitarian in me as a child when I saw it on TV.

8. I knew that A Christmas Carol popularized the celebration of Christmas with trees, lights, a turkey on Christmas Day, and generosity to those less fortunate, but I didn’t know that Dickens was a Unitarian (a religion that has been described as “"the religion of Jesus, not a religion about Jesus” and one with a strong social justice component). I also learned that A Christmas Carol was self-published, that the Dickens’ parents spent time in a debtor’s prison (for spending beyond their means), and that Dickens had a sickly brother like Tiny Tim whose name was Fred.

9. Another formative story in my childhood that was written around the same time period and was also about the power of giving was Hans Brinker (aka The Silver Skates). Hans Brinker is the story of a poor young Dutch boy who gives up his chance to win a pair of silver skates in an ice skating race on the frozen canal in December for the benefit of others. The heroic story of Peter and the Dike is also part of the Hans Brinker story.

10. Ice skating was a big part of my growing up years in Massachusetts, so it’s no surprise that my favorite Christmas song – which was especially poignant during the seven years I lived near Houston, Texas – is THIS.

11. When I was in Holland in 1996 I saw the canals that wound through the landscape dotted with windmill homes, but was told that the because of Global Warming the last time it got cold enough for the canals to freeze was sometime in the 60’s.

12. Speaking of Christmas blow-up yard ornaments (#1), Doug has a funny story posted about his wife chasing down some run away penguins and then tying her captives to the family gazebo HERE.

13. My new answering machine message: Leave your Kris Kringle after the Jingle.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. I used to sign my kid's Christmas presents SANTA and change my handwriting so they wouldn’t guess it was me. When they got older I signed them SANTA MARIA just for the fun of it.

2. I was recently typing “5 O’clock” and found myself wondering if it was Irish time.

3. I don’t know who could ever fill Oprah’s shoes because I don’t know who could walk in them.

4. A guest recently commented on her pointy toed stilettos and she explained that she only wore them for sitting.

5. In three years of blogging I can only remember ever getting two word verification codes that were actually real words. But some of these are so close that I think they beg for definitions: TERPOT, HARKATIC, GESSING, MIL, SPENCADE.

6. And is it any wonder that I kept calling the Cirque du Soleil show “Kooza,” Kazoo?

7. I recently saw a woman standing on the corner of our one traffic light in town and waving. For a second I thought she was hailing a cab.

8. But you can’t get Chinese Take-out, a long arm stapler, or a cab in Floyd.

9. Last Christmas I gave my son Josh a box of Chinese Cookies as a gift just so we could read the fortunes and because we both like to use them in our collages. The last fortune I got in a cookie was a smart ass one that said: Your sweetheart may be too beautiful for words for not for arguing.

10. My souvenir from the Cirque du Soleil is a handful of colored tissue confetti that was shot out of a cannon at the audience under a spotlight beam. I collected some for making collage.

11. There’s a new chick in town, at least new to me. Her name is NETCHICK and she’s taken over the Blogger’s Weekend Meet & Greet now that Michele, who I once called the fairy godmother of blogging, has retired.

12. I watched the whole of these two videos of Carrie Fisher talking about her new book Wishful Drinking on the Today Show. She’s quick and very funny but that’s not the main reason I was watching. I got hooked in because she looked like she had no legs and I kept staring and struggling to see where they were.

13. So don’t forget to think about what Scrooge's ghost said: mankind is your business. It’s also mine.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #163

Posted by Colleen at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. I know a young girl whose middle name is Lavender. If you were going to name a baby after an herb, flower, or spice, which would you choose?

2. If you had your own talk show, would you dress more like Oprah or Ellen?

3. When I walk to the mailbox I like exaggerate my stride and the movement of my hips to counter the effects of sitting too long at the computer. While doing this recently I remembered that in high school we called girls that wiggled while the walked “big wheels.” It was a derogatory term.

4. Big wheels are also those low to the ground three wheel bikes that played a major role in the early lives of my son’s generation.

5. Now I have Tina Turner’s song "Proud Mary" stuck in my head because of the “big wheel turning" line.

6. When I see guys with those Kewpie doll hairdos that stick up on the top of their head like THIS, they remind me of babies, and I wonder if they know that in the 50’s that’s how mother’s combed their baby boy’s heads.

7. I know a couple of kids named Sage, a young woman named Yarrow and another named Coriander.

8. I think of my blog as something like a DVD movie with menu selections. The informal writings I do, in balance with more formal pieces, are like backstage outtakes, deleted scenes, and my director’s commentary.

9. Writing poetry is like a tightrope walk between not being too obscure or too obvious.

10. THIS video clip of Bill Moyers talking about Barack Obama brought tears to my eyes.

11. When Joe and I were visiting Josh in Marshall, North Carolina, this past September we all drove over to Mars Hill, North Carolina, which was only a few miles and one letter away.

12. When an old friend of Joe’s offered us free tickets to see Cirque du Soleil this weekend in D.C. Joe asked if I wanted to go on such short notice. “Are you kidding?” I answered, “Cirque do Soleil is on my bucket list!”

13. Then I fantasized putting a sign on my blog that said: “Ran off with the Circus.”

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. When I posed the idea of writing a story on the new Floyd-based Natural Awakenings magazine to the publisher, she said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” I answered, “Sure, as long as it’s tea.”

2. I knew we were speaking the same language when during the interview I asked her how she found Floyd and she answered, “I don’t think you find Floyd. I think Floyd finds you.”

3. It boggles the mind: My sister Trish’s brother-in-law, Stephen Bowen, who is probably eating turkey in outer space with his crew mates right now, emailed the family some photos from inside the space shuttle on Saturday (some of which I posted HERE). It got me wondering, if Stephen can get online to email while out in space could he be reading my blog posts about the mission, and if so, where would my Statcounter say his visit was from.

4. Not only do I not shop on the day after Thanksgiving, I try to stay away from malls entirely this time of year. But I need a haircut. I want a fruitcake. Am I really too old to sit on Santa’s lap? Do I have enough butter for Christmas Eve cookies? Is it too soon to put up a tree? Read more from last year’s Mock Mincemeat Pie Hangover HERE.

5. I googled gobble and got THIS

6. I think THIS one is even funnier.

7. People are fun! The Google Gobble Soundtrack is HERE.

8. My friend, local blues musician Scott Perry is one of the few men I know who always wears a hat and isn’t even bald.

9. I have another Floyd friend named Phil who plays the harmonica. I call him the Philharmonic.

10. I’m a sucker for unnecessary knowledge. I recently learned from Pearl that the average person spends 12 weeks a year ‘looking for things.’ I then got sucked into the link she provided and learned that Steven King sleeps with the light on to calm his fear of the dark, Pinocchio was made of pine, the sand from Pacific beaches is generally 250,000 years older than Atlantic beach sand, ostriches can run 50 miles per hour, Napoleon constructed his battle plans in a sandbox, and India has a Bill of Rights for cow. The list goes on HERE.

11. My friend Doug is always pointing out that one of the downsides to living in a rural county is that you can’t get Chinese take-out here. I recently discovered that you can’t get a long arm stapler either, which I needed to staple my new TEAPOET chapbook. I eventually found one to borrow at a local church, which uses it for stapling their church bulletins.

12. Not long after we moved into this house in 1991 our closest neighbor asked to borrow a cup of sugar. But I have never bought sugar and so we offered him honey. He hasn’t tried to borrow anything since.

13. My take on church: I’d rather watch the birds and ponder Quantum Physics.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

1. Why did my sister Trish Bowen, who I think looks like Meg Ryan, model a T-shirt on Fox News on her birthday? See the video clip answer HERE.

2. The photo posted below appeared in The Boston Herald yesterday and is of Trish (front and center), her husband Danny, her sons Matthew (left) and Patrick (right), and her son’s aunt and cousins, all showing off the space memorabilia they got on their recent trip to Florida to watch Danny’s brother, Astronaut Stephen Bowen, and the rest of the Space Shuttle Endeavour crew take-off from the Kennedy Space Center last Friday (which I wrote about HERE).

3. I told Trish, who was a cheerleader in high school, that she looks like she was on the top of a pyramid cheer, just like the old days.

4. Everyone is very proud of Stephen, and Trish and her family have been getting a lot of attention from the media because of his space flight, but they were famous even before that for being on my blog! See Matthew HERE and Patrick HERE.

5. It’s been reported in the media that Stephen Bowen is an ice-cream junkie and I just learned that a local ice-cream shop near Cohasset, Massachusetts, where the Bowen’s are from, named a flavor after him. It’s called Cohastranaut Crunch.

6. The Endeavour’s destination of the International Space Station was reached on Sunday for what has been described as a “home make-over.” After reading my previous post on Stephen’s space flight a friend sent me THIS link, listing the dates and times when the Space Station can be seen (as something like a bright star) from Floyd. You can type in your own location to find out the best times for you to see it.

7. When I read what the Boston Herald reported yesterday: A navy captain and the first submarine officer selected by NASA as a mission specialist, Bowen spent roughly six hours on what an agency spokeswoman called a “milestone mission,” clearing away metal grit and lubricating the joint of the station’s solar wing – I wondered if while working Stephen was thinking about laying tile, once the Bowen family business.

8. Since I don’t get CNN, I watched the launch on Youtube. I couldn’t help but wonder about how much fuel the space launch used and how much the take-off looked like a mushroom cloud.

9. Did you know that there is rocket fuel in cigarettes, along with some of the same chemicals found in lighter fluid, moth balls, burial embalmment, nail polish remover, toilet bowl cleaners?

10. The photo above is a Blast from the Past that shows my sister Trish’s wedding to Danny Bowen in 1991. That’s me on the far left and future astronaut Stephen, who was my wedding party escort, standing behind me.

11. THAT was then and THIS is now.

12. When my brother Jim died in 2001, my young nephew Patrick asked his mom, “Is Jimmy an astronaut now?”

13. The soundtrack to this post is HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. Me on the phone with my son Dylan, father of 6 month old Bryce: “After a couple of weeks I can’t stop thinking about Bryce, and I need to see him.” Dylan: “I know. That happens to me everyday at work.”

2. Me to Joe: “Is it pathetic that the highlight of my day is my walk to the mailbox? But maybe if Lao Tzu or the Dali Lama were here it would be their favorite part of the day too,” I reason.

3. Later that same day, Joe and I laid out on a blanket in the yard in the middle of an unseasonably warm day and watched squirrels jump from tree to tree and the sun go down behind the house. “I just got a new highlight of my day,” I told him.

4. Wow! My Asheville Potter son Josh and his claymates from ClaySpace are on the front page of Asheville’s Arts and Events newspaper, Mountain XPress (pictured below). Read the article HERE. Josh’s pots also recently showed up HERE.

5. I can be wiping off the kitchen counter, sorting through papers on my desk, or driving in my car to the grocery store when I find myself suddenly saying out loud for no other reason than to hear how it sounds, “President Obama.”

6. This first time we’ve had a president that I actually care so much about that I wake up and in the morning and think, I wonder how Barack is doing today.

7. My friend Pearl speaks my language. She recently said: "I still haven’t blogged yesterday and here it is almost tomorrow again."

8. My blog is part journal, part photo album, and part filing cabinet.

9. I’ve been excited about Obama winning since it happened, but it took almost a week for me to thaw from the numbness of the last 8 years enough to shed tears of relief. I was listening to NPR news on the ride to Roanoke to baby-sit Bryce when it happened. After a newscaster announced Obama’s plan to quickly close Guantanamo and to renew the Justice Department, which has been reduced to shambles by politicization, I just broke down.

10. My friend Amy was over helping me format a duplex printed booklet of my teapoet poems. At one point she was at the computer hitting print and I was holding sheets of 5x7 white paper, feeding them one at time to the printer so it wouldn’t jam, when I said to her, “I feel like a girl again with my Nana giving me a perm.” You’d have to have grown up in the 50’s and 60's to remember holding those small white sheets of tissue paper and handing them to the hairdresser or your grandmother who would use them to wrap a perm roller that would then be doused with ammonia and other chemicals. Amy understood. “It had to be a Toni,” she laughed and said, adding, “At least we don’t have to put up with the smell.”

11. At another point, we used a ruler to measure the booklet. I handed it to her and said, “Gee, I just love the low tech nature of a ruler. It’s nothing but a stick, but we still need it.”

12. Amy is a multi-talented entrepreneur with a great sense of humor, whose business, New Vision, provides innovative ideas and other services to help other small businesses grow. She recently started a new business selling gay greeting cards. I especially like the Christmas one. See HERE.

13. When I was in town today, someone asked, “How are you?” and I answered, “As good as can be expected from someone who woke at the crack of dawn by squirrels jumping on the roof of my house and tossing nuts down on my car.”

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #159

Posted by Colleen at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. I drove over the remains of a smashed pumpkin on the way to town the other day. Getting smashed in the road is not a completely uncommon way for a pumpkin to meet its end, as opposed to THIS.

2. A new take on election yard signs HERE.

3. Apparently, I’m the last to know about the puking pumpkin phenomena. It’s all over google images and youtube. See the last photo HERE.

4. The two herbs I quickly go through time of year: cinnamon and cumin. In other words, my menu staples right now are apple crisp and chili.

5. THIS is the video clip I forgot to post a few days ago. Wait for it … Now … Nice catch!

6. Watching the results of the election last night was a lot like New Years Eve. I even had a hangover the next morning from staying up too late.

7. I can tell I have post-election fatigue when I make the drive to Blacksburg, like I did today, and don’t pull over to take a picture when I see a spectacular scene or some other kind of photographic opportunity.

8. McCain gave a class act concession speech and Barack’s post election speech exemplified that fact that he’s a true leader. I don't see how anyone could have heard it and not be moved. My favorite line was when he told his daughters how much he loved them, and then said, “You earned the puppy that is coming with us to the White House.” THIS is my other favorite part (yes, the whole 17 minutes).

9. At 6:20 p.m. on Election Day night I got a call from Barack Obama. Even though I knew it was a robocall I was stunned and star struck so much that I talked back to the recording. “I’ve already voted, Barack,” I said.

10. Floyd for Obama on the Huffington Post HERE. Those are the same activists and friends I shot photos of which made it to the Floyd Press. See HERE

11. I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality. ~ Martin Luther King

12. I celebrate that Barack will be our country’s first African American President, but I didn’t vote for him for the color of his skin. I voted for him for the content of his character. Not since JFK (who was killed when I was a teenager) have I felt so enthusiastic about a President’s ability to lead, to inspire, and to unite our country. Barack is rational, articulate, calm, caring, humble, and has demonstrated that he has a grasp on national and international issues.

13. After the last presidential election in 2004 a friend drove over to our house, shaken and with tears in her eyes at the result. This year another friend had a similar reaction but for the opposite reason. Our candidate won AND Virginia went blue. Click your mouse HERE for a virtual Victory celebration.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

1. My friend Jamie Reynolds married Elisha Seigle and changed his name to Jamie Reygle. Recently I received and email from him and noticed he’s now calling himself Jamie Hussein Reygle.

2. My commentary “Does Size Matter: A Vote for Smart Government” appeared with others in a spread of excerpted commentaries in the Sunday Horizon of The Roanoke Times. The collection of election essays, in which 12 out of 13 are pro-Obama, are published in their entirety online HERE.

3. First Colin Powell and now Fonzie, Richie, Andy Griffith, and Opie have all come out to endorse Obama HERE.

4. Things that make me go YIKES posted by Alice Audrey HERE.

5. After more than three years, I feel like my blog is like an overgrown dinosaur and it's only a matter of time before the poles shift and it falls off the face of the earth, becoming extinct.

6. When it comes to the computer, I have to confess to being a hoarder who has emails back into 2006 and hates to delete anything. My disc space is nearly full on both my PC and my laptop, so Joe just gave me a lesson on kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes. I’ve started to make some efforts in turning that blue pie back to pink.

7. Is it all in our heads? Why do we think a bowl of noodles looks delicious but a bowl of worms doesn’t?

8. I can see the witch from Snow White (above) standing with her hands on her hips in the pattern on my bedroom rug. I can also see the Queen of hearts (to the right) holding cheerleading pom poms in her hands.

9. Last night Joe and I watched the movie Star*dust.The man who wrote the fairytale the film is based on said when he visited the movie set he felt guilty that something he made up in his head for fun and that took up a paragraph of words (like the pirate ship that sails in the sky collecting lightening) took 100’s of people and millions of dollars to build and bring to life.

10. Which made me feel creepy about all the money and resources that are spent for our mega entertainment and made me wish they’d only make a handful of movies each year and the rest of the time we’d tell stories, watch local plays, and read books.

11. I have a real friend named Steven Strange.

12. Isn’t it ironic that election season comes around the same time as Halloween, with all those creepy Republican campaign ads on TV scaring your kids and pets?

13. Simon says: Click HERE for the Strange Brew soundtrack.

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Posted by Colleen at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. Fellow poet, Scrabble player and Floyd Spoken Word participant, Chelsea Adams took the words right out of my mouth and put them down in an eloquent order for THIS Roanoke Times commentary about Pro-life vs. Pro-choice. It’s well worth the read.

2. My spell check is like a far right fundamentalist Republican robocall because whenever I type the name Obama it suggests I say Osama instead.

3. Typing the word Obama reminded me of the story I recently did for the Floyd Press about a talented teenager who sings Opera. So many of my stories this spring and summer seemed to focus on outstanding women like, Kari Kovick, Rosemary Wyman, Mara Robbins, Tenley Weaver, and Pam Cadmus. More recently they have been about talented young people like Abraham Cherrix, The Junior Jamboree players, Rowan Chantal, and now Carolyn Kirby.

4. Whenever I type OPERA (which is rare) my mind confuses it with the word with OPRAH.

5. I called Mara to ask if she do some poetry performance at the Floyd Democratic Rally this Friday. I didn’t expect her to answer and was all ready to leave a message and when I heard “Hello Colleen.” For a few seconds I was shocked and flattered to think that her answering machine message was "Hello Colleen."

6. Now you can have your own Saturday Night Live Sarah Palin skit game HERE. Move your mouse around and click all over. The place is boobie trapped with spoof.

7. It was so refreshing to see Barack and a relaxed McCain in the same place making jokes about each other that really were funny. See HERE.

8. It’s true. Barack Obama is Irish. See HERE. His ancestors came from the same county some of mine did HERE.

9. The social scientist in me loves to study human nature, take informal surveys and document life. I like to track the progress we’re making with tolerance and equality, and so I intuitively make a note to myself of minority representation and the ratio of women to men at events or in books and other print media. When I drive the 25 mile stretch to Christiansburg for errands a couple of times a month, I like to keep track of things like: the ratio of those wearing seat belts and not, how many commuters are driving alone or not, or how many are driving trucks and SUV’s as opposed to small gas efficient cars.

10. Recently I made the Christiansburg trip with a paper and pen nearby and kept tallies of election yard signs. Being from a largely Republican area, I was surprised at how even the score was – McCain 10 to Obama 8. But if the two of the houses I saw with Democratic signs for Boucher and Warner posted in their yards had added one for Obama, it would have been a dead even tie. (Note: on the seven mile ride from my house to town, the tally of Obama to McCain signs is even).

11. I saw feminist and founder of Ms. Magazine Gloria Steinem on Oprah this week. She said something very wise in reference to her husband’s death that reminded me how loosely we use the word depression these days: "In depression, nothing matters. In sadness and grief, everything matters. Everything was more poignant."

12. And here’s what Steinem (who thinks that Sarah Palin is like Phyllis Schlafly, only younger) said about orgasms when she turned 70: "You put on a pair of jeans and realize they're older than most people in the United States. And you remember things from your childhood but not necessarily from the day before. That's when you start to think that remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm."

13. Do you think THIS photo has been photo-shopped? And if not could the article in question be part of THIS shopping spree?

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Posted by Colleen at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

1. Everyone knows that Poets are born and not made in school. This is true also of painters, sculptors, and musicians. Something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, earned, or formulated in a manner to mysterious to be picked apart and redesigned for the next person. ~ So says Mary Oliver in the beginning paragraph of her book, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry.

2. Relationships are like bank accounts. Over the years you can accrue a lot of interest through honest communication and quality time spent together. But if you continue to draw from your investment without making regular deposits of loving interaction you can end up squandering the riches you’ve already earned.

3. Staying current is a good currency to use in healthy relationships.

4. My note taking habit is to separate projects I’m working on by taking notes on one subject in the front of my notebook and notes on another in the back of my notebook. Eventually my notes meet each other in the middle and I know it’s time to get a new notebook.

5. Palin speaks Orwellian HERE. To John McCain’s credit HERE. Although, it should be noted that the flame McCain is trying to put out is one he started and enlisted Palin to fan.

6. There’s a new TV commercial where allergy suffers who aren’t taking the new and improved allergy medication are shown going around with signs on their backs that say “Drowsiness May Occur.” “I want a sign like that too, I said to Joe.

7. I took Joe’s yoga mat outside at night and laid on it in the grass to watch the stars because star and moon gazing brings the poetry out in me. Because poems with stars aren’t like those with cicadas …They don’t cause migraines or push agendas … They open our eyes like brushed on mascara … They flutter and blink … They fall …

8. While participating in a recent Woman’s Dialogue, in which the subject was POWER, I realized that the word begins with a POW and ends with EEERRRR, a hard hitting word with an engine to drive it.

9. Maybe that’s why POWER is so often associated with POWER OVER rather than personal empowerment and the ability to get things done and make things happen.

10. Here’s something I learned this week: You can’t judge an event by what is happening in the moment but only by what happens after it’s over, and over time. Real learning can be far reaching. It takes time to ripple and settle.

11. Since becoming unleashed – retiring from full-time foster care and writing at home as much as I want to – I’ve been living on unscripted instinct, like a creature. It took a couple of years for most of the “shoulds” and imposed structure to fall away. I’m no longer trying to improve myself. I don’t pray for things to be any different than they are. I’m okay with doing just what I find myself doing and with shlelping around in my house clothes writing stories and poetry like a nutty professor in a lab.

12. Not surprising, THIS is my latest theme song.

13. I also learned this: I’m easy to please because I’m already pleased, but sometimes I need to be reminded.

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Posted by Colleen at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. Our dog Jasmine lies around while deer come in the yard and eat from our garden, like I let the answering machine pick-up because I don’t want to bother answering the phone.

2. I can’t help wondering if I had been jogging instead of blogging these last 3 years how fit I might be now.

3. Instead of twiddling my thumbs, I’d rather be popping bubble wrap.

4. After seeing Sarah Palin winking into the TV camera during the Vice Presidential debate, I wondered what the responses would have been if Geraldine Ferrari winked during her VP debate in 1984. Then I started imagining other women in positions of power winking. What would it be like if Condi Rice started winking? Could Margaret Thatcher have gotten away with it? How about Janet Reno?

5. So, isn’t winking like crossing your fingers behind your back?

6. A major British newspaper recently sent a reporter to Roanoke, (just down the mountain from us) to see what real swing state people think about the election. The results are HERE. Thanks to Blue Country Magic for posting the link. More voices from Roanoke on the election are HERE.

7. Bridget Bardot, 74 year old activist and one time sex symbol movie star recently said that Sarah Palin was a disgrace to women. Bardot, who heads up an animal rights group, implored Palin not to compare herself to dogs, referring to Palin’s depiction of herself as a pit-bull wearing lipstick. She said, "I know them well and I can assure you that no pit-bull, no dog, nor any other animal for that matter is as dangerous as you are.”

8. Tina Fey did not write the above line, nor did it come from Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers’ SNL Weekend Update of the fake news. It’s true. Bardot actually said it.

9. I wrote this line and it’s also true: I was getting kind of tired of being Joe’s secretary and giving him pat answers when he checks in to see who has called him. So the last time he called home and asked “did I get any messages?” I answered jokingly: “Yeah. Your mother called. She wants you back.”

10. Forclosure? The Bermuda Triangle? What would we do on Thursday without the 13 Thursday meme game prompting us to visit blogging friends, new and old? We found out last week when no one showed up at the TT hub to host the game. So people added their new links to Sept 24th edition and proceeded to play, acting like nothing was different.

11. Actor Will Arnett is married to SNL’s Amy Pohler. His Wikipedia bio says: "He and Amy have two dogs, Hank and Gerald." His wife’s Wikipedia Bio says: "They live in New York City and have two dogs, Toby and Elliott."

12. Does that mean that they really have four dogs or that someone is holding crossed fingers behind their back?

13. It's almost THIS time of year again. Can you guess which one is me?

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Posted by Colleen at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. This is the time of year I like to sunbathe on the porch because it’s cool enough to soak it up. Letting all that good warmth and Vitamin D penetrate my skin makes me feel like a solar voltaic panel storing sun for the winter.

2. Golden parachutes? How about being fired and fined instead?

3. While Joe and I were visiting my Asheville potter son Josh last week, we watched the first presidential debate with him at one of his friend’s house. Our favorite part was when McCain talked about the bracelet he was wearing and then Obama showed his and said “I have a bracelet too.” McCain’s bracelet was given to him by mother who lost her son in Iraq and who asked him to make sure her son didn’t die in vain. Obama’s was also given to him by a mother who lost a son in Iraq. She wanted him to make sure no other mother would have to go through what she did.

4. While in downtown Marshall, I saw a shop called MY SISTER’S PLACE, but my mind added two little strokes to the L in the word PLACE and I saw it as MY SISTER’S PEACE.

5. Josh recently had to update his resume for a ClaySpace press packet, but he’s been so busy with the tasks at hand that he forgot some of the shows he’s done past year. “I had to google myself to find out what I’ve been doing,” he said.

6. I think Josh, whose father is English, has a Cockney Rhyming Slang gene. The lingo he uses fascinates me to the point that I write it down when I hear it. This past weekend I learned that “spitting game” had something to do with a pick-up line and that calling someone a “bag of hammers” was another way of saying they were screwed-up.

7. At his BFA thesis show in December of 2006, Josh’s eight foot handmade brick wall art installation with the word INDIVIDUAL stamped on each brick conveyed that a single person isn’t as powerful as when they join together with others and build community. Another installation at that show was an interactive piece made of bricks stamped with the word COMMUNITY, which people moved around during the show. Some took the COMMUNITY bricks home after getting Josh to sign them. See one HERE.

8. Josh has a friend who, on two different occasions, tried to take a brick home to Arizona, but each time the brick was confiscated by airport security.

9. But you can mail a brick "as is" without any packaging, as blogger Naomi found out when Josh mailed her an unwrapped brick with her address written on the surface.

10. I have to wonder if Josh was the first person to mail a single brick.

11. I google Josh’s name when I want to find out what he’s been up to, too. Most recently I found THIS photo of him presenting a COMMUNITY brick to fellow North Carolina potter and pottery blogger Michael Kline. After that, I found THIS blog with another picture of Josh on it. It was authored by Rob Cartelli, a potter who took the two month Penland class on woodfiring clay made of local materials that Josh assistant taught this past spring.

12. We take bricks for granted, but the oldest ones found date back to 7,500 B.C., and from Josh I became aware of how important they have been to civilization, as this excerpt from a story I wrote for the Floyd Press called Building Community in Floyd says: Josh opened my eyes more fully to the role clay has played in human survival when he stated that the conceptual basis for his BFA Show was a pipe, a vessel, and a brick and then explained the significance of early ceramics: a pipe moves water and sewer, a vessel stores and transports food, and brick is used to make shelter. More HERE.

13. And then there is THIS. Do you remember it?

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Posted by Colleen at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

1. This is the time of year when I put on socks, and the butter in the butter dish is no longer the consistency of mayonnaise.

2. Have you noticed how the Jonas Brothers look like the Hanson Brothers with dark hair?

3. Double take would make a good name for a second hand clothing shop.

4. I once had a recycling bumper sticker on my car that said “Once is Not Enough.” Under that one I had second one, confirming that “Once is Not Enough.”

5. Shopping for men’s shirts at the thrift shop is like looking through Hallmark cards for Father’ Day… hunting scenes, plaids, and stripes is all you get.

6. The chant “Drill Baby Drill” at the RNC separated the boys from the men. And by men I mean drunken sailors on the make.

7. Tina Fey at the Emmys on playing Sarah Palin: "I want to be done playing this lady November 5th. So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady November 5th that would be good for me." Hint hint…

8. But it was Laura Linney who made the best discreet political reference of the night. While accepting her award for her role in the John Adams mini-series she made the comment that our Founding Fathers were community organizers.

9. The economic crisis: This is what less government (The Republican motto) gets us. Privatization without oversight means a free for all, but it always falls in the end, sadly, on the backs of the taxpayers.

10. The Katrina catastrophe was another example of how less government works (or doesn’t). Bush considered FEMA an “entitlement program,” so he demoted its status and appointed inexperienced cronies to run it, dismantling the progress that Clinton had made. The rest is sad history.

11. A sure sign that I’ve been watching too many political shows and that the economic crisis is having an affect on me: I dreamt that I had two flat tires in an old car I no longer own. PBS News Hour commentator Mark Shields was my mechanic. I trusted his Boston accent and his familiar face that looks like my father’s did, so I turned over the keys and said, “I know you’re smart. I’ve seen you on TV.” He charged me a couple of thousand dollars to fix the car, and when I demanded to know why, he showed me the elaborate waiting room in his garage, part of the tacked on cost.

12. I just learned that Mark Shields is from Weymouth Massachusetts, about eight miles from where I grew up and where I lived and worked for six years. The drug dealer the movie Blow was based on, played by Johnny Depp, is also from Weymouth. So is Hal Holbrook.

13. Supposedly I should have looked like THIS when I graduated from high school in 1968. But I really looked like THIS. What did you look like in 1968? Yearbook yourself HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

1. I like PBS’s Shields and Brooks but David Byrne is my favorite Talking Head. He has a blog too. HERE.

2. How come a dunce cap and a wizard cap are both the same?

3. My current imaginary bumpers sticker is a mathematical equation that says: McCain+Palin=Bushx. Hey, this is not rocket science. See HERE.

4. Truck spotted in Texas during Hurricane Ike with a sign painted on it that read: GO HOME IKE … TINA IS NOT HERE!!

5. Signs spotted at the protest against Palin in Anchorage this past Saturday: BUSH IN A SKIRT … LIPSTICK CAN’T COVER THE TRUTH … SORRY SARAH WE JUST LOVE OUR COUNTRY MORE … FUNDAMENTALY FLAWED … DIDN’T BLINK= DIDN’T THINK … BRISTOL GOT TO CHOOSE WHY CAN’T WE? Video clip is HERE.

6. Lately I’ve been reading stories from the Anchorage Daily News. Here’s one on Alaska bloggers and how their 200 a day hits have recently gone up into the thousands.

7. Loose Leaf isn’t a political blog but I write about politics. It isn’t a blog about Floyd but I write about Floyd. It’s a place where my daily journal converges with my poetry, photography, and prose. It’s a writer’s discipline and a container to organize and store my formal and informal writing.

8. As someone who has been blogging for 3 ½ years, this is my first presidential election as a blogger, so it’s only natural that there would be more posts on politics than there normally are. As the election gets closer, it’s pretty much on my mind every day.

9. I’m one of those people who think politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions and I want to be in on the decisions that affect me as much as I can. I don’t think politics is separate from the rest of life, and I believe there is truth to this quote: “Anyone who says they are not interested in politics is like a drowning man who insists he is not interested in water.”

10. Plato said this: “Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

11. The last election is responsible for me taking up blogging. I had been doing a lot of political writing – which was published in The New River Free Press, Roanoke Times, Common Dreams, Just Response, Online Journal, and other places – but I got so frustrated about the Bush administration's marketing of the Iraq War and Bush’s re-election that I burned out. I decided I wanted to have more fun with writing, so I drew on my Irish storytelling heritage, posted the above bio photo of me in Ireland with a shamrock pinned to my sweater, and let the gift of gab begin.

12. The heads are talking and the tongues are wagging: This picture (right) of me and my nephew Matthew is my favorite one from the summer. I like to know that I have an influence on the younger generation.

13. What do you think of THIS two headed turtle that made Dave Letterman go “EEEWWW?”

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Posted by Colleen at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. I like to keep at least one toy in my pocketbook. For some reason it makes me feel prepared.

2. Working my laptop touch pad is like eating noodles with chopsticks. I’d rather use a fork and mouse.

3. I feel like THIS more and more often. It's worth a whole listen.

4. I thought I recognized THAT guy. I used to have a crush on him and heard him sing at the South Shore Music Circus in the 70’s. Here’s a BEFORE and AFTER video of him and THIS one, dedicated to my sister Sherry. (Thanks to Marion for starting this sentimental journey by emailing me the first video, unaware of what she'd stir up.)

5. It’s a fun idea for a S-C-R-A-B-B-L-E lover like me but I don’t think I’d have to guts to have a tombstone like THIS. More unusual tombstones are HERE.

6. I thought the Drill Baby Drill refrain that the crowd chanted and Giuliani joined in on at the RNC sounded like a bunch of drunken sailors and was as bad as Bush’s Bring ‘em on.

7. Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said during an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that chanting Drill Baby Drill refrain at the RNC is like the equivalent of chanting “IBM typewriters … IBM typewriters” at the onset of the computer age. He also said he thought Obama was the only green candidate left. More HERE.

8. My Terry Gross is young, has long straight blonde hair, looks a little like the actress Laura Linney, and doesn’t wear glasses. This Terry Gross – the real one who produces and hosts National Public Radio’s interview talk show “Fresh Air” – is petite to the point of looking like Mary Martin playing the role of Peter Pan. She has short cropped hair, wears glasses, and is in her late 50s. ~ Read about the time I got interviewed by Terry Gross (sort of) HERE.

9. Last week I wondered when saying “God Bless America” by each politician after each speech given became required. Here’s what I found from the Washington Post: The omnipresence of “God bless America” as a political slogan is an entirely recent phenomenon. We know because we’ve run the numbers. Analysis of more than 15,000 public communications by political leaders from Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 — the beginning of the modern presidency — through six years of George W. Bush’s administration revealed that prior to Ronald Reagan taking office in 1981, the phrase had passed a modern president’s lips only once in a major address: Richard Nixon used it to conclude a 1973 speech about Watergate.

10. Ripped from the pages of my journal: Republicans and Democrats are like Fords and Chevys. Like the Yankees and the Red Sox, they have an almost irrational need to take sides.

11. How did the left come to refer to liberal and the right conservative? This apparently arose from the use of the terms in the parliaments of foreign countries; the parts of the parliamentary chambers located to the right and left of the presiding officers accordingly representing conservative and liberal elements respectively. More HERE.

12. I never liked the symbol of the donkey for the Democratic Party. The Republican elephant is only a little better. Seems neither party chose their mascot symbols. They got stuck with them after a series of cartoons by Thomas Nast that first appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1874. More on that HERE.

13. If Republicans are from Mars and Liberals are from Venus, where are Independents from?

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Posted by Colleen at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

1. I watched PBS's full coverage of the Democratic National Convention like others watched the Olympics (which I didn’t).

2. I don’t watch sports either, but watched Sheryl Crow, Stevie Wonder, and Michael McDonald sing at the DNC like others watch the Super Bowl at halftime.

3. I’m a registered Independent, fiscally conservative, who votes Democrat because they represent my interests in Labor Rights, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and Environmental Protections better than their counterparts. (They also have been better at balancing the budget and controlling the deficit as of late).

4. From day one my first choice for the Democratic Presidential Candidate would have been Al Gore, then Obama, then Hillary. I liked Kucinich too but he reminded me of Ringo to the Beatles Paul, John, and George. We needed his truthful drumbeat to keep it all together, but in reality, he wasn’t going to be writing or singing those top ten songs.

5. Gore (who is my true president in an alternate world) joked: John McCain, a man who has earned our respect on many levels, is now openly endorsing the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House and promising to actually continue them, the same policies all over again. Hey, I believe in recycling, but that's ridiculous.

6. Seriously though, he also said: “We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.”

7. Oprah supposedly cried her eyelashes off listening to Obama’s speech. See HERE.

8. Republican, Pat Buchanan thought it was the best speech he ever heard and that it transcended politics. See HERE.

9. Buchanan’s favorite line from Obama's speech: I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.

10. One of mine was: I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don't fit the typical pedigree, and I haven't spent my career in the halls of Washington. But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you.

11. I remember a time when every single politician that gave a speech didn’t have to end it with “God Bless America.” When did that become required?

12. Bill Clinton’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention was met with one of the longest ovations ever recorded at such an event. That was before he got stuck in an elevator.

13. I guess I wasn’t alone: More people watched Obama speak from a packed stadium in Denver on Thursday than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final "American Idol" or the Academy Awards this year, Nielsen Media Research said Friday. ~ AP

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Posted by Colleen at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. When it comes to the school of life I don’t do a lot of homework but I pay attention in class.

2. My friend Mara says she’s a “one hour photo” sort of person.

3. How come after spending three weeks vacationing on the beach when I finally got home I felt like I had missed the summer?

4. My nails were ragged, my bangs overgrown, the corn in my garden had dried on the stalks, and I hadn’t seen butterfly since I left.

5. I bought one of those shark steam floor cleaners after watching the infomercial on TV. I’m here to report that it works great on an already clean floor, which is another way of saying that it doesn’t.

6. I already miss Polaroid pictures. Even though I didn’t take many, I liked knowing I could.

7. I recently noticed that little girls never wear black bathing suits.

8. I was glad I had my "Miracle Suit" (bought at 70% at the outlet mall in Rehobeth) when we went out for ice cream on our last night on vacation. I couldn’t decide which flavor to get so I got two scoops of two different kinds in giant cone. The Miracle Suit claims to make you look 10 pounds lighter.

9. In a dream so beautiful could you dare to be a miracle? ~ Jeff Puryear Donna the Buffalo.

10. I think of libraries like I think of embassies. No matter where you are you can go into one for information and refuge.

11. I chew down corn on the cob like I mow my lawn, with little pieces left sticking up between the rows.

12. I love to play in the sand. You can play HERE.

13. Remember when interest in Senator Obama soared after he gave the keynote speech at the last Democratic National Convention? Last night our former Governor Mark Warner, who I was Floydfesting with in July HERE and who I wrote about in Floyd Press HERE, gave the address. See why Warner could be President someday HERE.

P.S. THIS is the real miracle.

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Posted by Colleen at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. In a pinch when I’m at the beach without a notebook, I can write in the margins of a clam box menu using my flip flop sandal for a desk.

2. Compared to the crowds here at Bethany Beach, Delaware, where we’re visiting Joe’s family, and Nantasket Beach in Hull, Massachusetts, where I was recently visiting mine; Nantasket was practically deserted, but Bethany is better for swimming because the water is so much warmer.

3. At a certain hour in the evening the whole town goes out for ice cream cones, like every kid rides a boogie board at the ocean during the day.

4. The woman who goes up and down the beach looking for coins with a metal detector reminds me of someone feeling for change in the back of the cushions of a couch.

4. I’m starting to want to learn lifeguard sign language.

5. On the sixteenth day of my two state beach vacations, I woke up and said to Joe, “Woe is me. Another day to spend on the beach and the sun is shining.”

6. When I was in Hull, I was reading from an old box of letters that my mother gave me, sent to my dad when he was in the army during WWII. If I wasn’t convinced that my Irish grandparents were poets, the letter they wrote to my dad convinced me. It was signed: “Oceans of Love and a Kiss on each Wave, Ma and Pa.”

7. The waves are so much bigger in Bethany than they are in Nantasket. When they’re really high, I have to carefully plot my way past the breakers and into the ocean, like I navigate my bike across the highway during traffic.

8. I bought a new “Miracle Suit” at 70% off at the Rehobeth Outlet Mall. Will I be able to walk on water now?

9. Watching a father run into the ocean to save his young daughter from a giant wave wipe-out, brought tears to my eyes.

10. Joe was reading this out loud from “Wise Heart” by Jack Kornfield: “Each time we meet another human being and honor their dignity, we help those around us. Their hearts resonate with ours in exactly the same way the strings of an unplucked violin vibrate with the sounds of a violin playing nearby. Western psychology has documented this phenomenon of “mood contagion” or limbic resonance. If a person filled with panic or hatred walks into a room, we feel it immediately, and unless we are very mindful, that person’s negative state will begin to overtake ours. When a joyfully expressive person walks into the room, we can feel that state as well.”

11. Next, he read about the Dalai Lama staying in a hotel for dignitaries while visiting San Francisco. “When it was time to leave he told the hotel management that he wanted to thank the staff in person, as many as wished to meet him. So on the last morning a long line of maids and dishwashers, cooks and maintenance men, secretaries and managers made their way to the circular driveway at the hotel entrance. And before the Dalai Lama’s motorcade left, he walked down the line of employees, lovingly touching each hand, vibrating the strings of each heart,” Kornfield wrote.

12. Watching dolphins from the beach is always a treat, even though they look like sharks. When I first saw whales off the coast off Provincetown a few years ago, I learned how the saying ‘I was floored' came about because I was so overwhelmed at the awesome sight of them that I literally dropped down to the floor.

13. The Bethany Beach experience is not complete until we: 1. Get an overflowing tub of hand-cut, peanut oil fried French fries. 2. Walk or ride our bikes downtown for an ice-cream cone on the boardwalk. 3. Buy a new toy in the toy store like THIS one. Jaws on the beach video Here.

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Posted by Colleen at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

1. The night after my fisherman brother John brought lobsters home and I video-taped them, he said, “Colleen, I have something else for you to take pictures of” and then he spread THESE out on the table.

2. I guess I’m a full-time beach bum now, at least for the rest of August. After spending ten days visiting my family in the Massachusetts beach town I grew up in, and with only one day at home in Floyd, I’m heading out with Joe to visit his mother who also lives by the beach.

3. While in Hull, an old friend was hitting on me. He’s done that since high school and I guess he feels compelled to keep up the charade. When I reminded him that I was happily married, he assured me that he was harmless, saying, “I’m impotent.”

4. We then went on to have a long conversation about how the drug Cialis works because we are just that comfortable with each other and I was curious, never having known anyone who used it. (His condition is a side effect of heart medication).

5. At the airport check-in a bottle of my facial cleanser was confiscated when it was determined to be a tad too big for what they allow. The same thing happened to Deana a couple of weeks ago, but she had time to put hers back in her car. With fifteen minutes before my plane took off, I was randomly chosen to be patted down and have my bags checked, so I wasn’t so lucky (besides the fact that I had no car to take it to).

6. During the bag check, feeling sure I was going to miss my plane, I couldn’t tell if I was breathing deeply to calm myself down, or if I was hyperventilating.

7. Deana’s confiscated skin care product cost over $40. Mine was a fruit enzyme cleanser from Mychelle for about $16. I like Mychelle products because they contain no parabens (estrogen mimicker), artificial chemicals, colors, or fragrances.

8. Your body absorbs about 50% of what you put on your skin, which is why when I buy a skin product, I ask myself, ‘could I eat this?”

9. Losing the bottle of facial cleanser and being patted down at the airport was the least of my problems. I hope to write more about the cancelled flights I endured and an unscheduled overnight in Saugus, eight miles from Logan on Boston’s north shore. I’m calling this unwritten pieced “The Saugus Saga.”

10. The good news was that because of the delay I flew into Roanoke instead of Greensboro, which meant that Joe (who picked me up) and I were able to get a twenty minute fix of baby Bryce before heading up the mountain to Floyd. Video clip is HERE.

11. I was so happy to see the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains from the plane window that I took several photos of them. With the focused camera I could stop the plane propeller but when I looked at it with my eye it was going too fast to see.

12. I want to put a door and door frame that opens to nowhere in my yard so I can imagine myself walking through it while imagining a new frame of mind.

13. Sanity should return in September.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #146

Posted by Colleen at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. You know you’re having a hometown vacation when you’re riding your mother’s neighbor’s bike and someone stops you on the street to ask where the library is and you actually know.

2. I get such a boost from my sunset walks at the ocean that when I get ready to take one I tell my mother I’m going down for my Vitamin B-each shot.

3. Because my hometown is a peninsula, only about five miles long and as narrow as a road wide in some places, I can start watching the sunset from the ocean and then walk to the bay and see the rest of it.

4. Named after Hull England, Hull Massachusetts is 20 miles from Boston by car and only 5 miles by sea. The main beach is called Nantasket, named by the Wampanoag Indian Tribe and meaning "at the strait" or "low-tide place."

5. In July of 2005 I posted an excerpt from the book I wrote, The Jim and Dan Stories, about the white feather that dropped in my path while walking on Nantasket Beach after my brother Jimmy died in 2001, and one that appeared in the hospital a month later, right before my brother Danny died. Three years later I’m still getting comments on that post. See HERE.

6. Former Boston mayor John F. Fitzgerald, the father of Rose Kennedy; President Calvin Coolidge; and Joe Kennedy Sr. all summered in Hull. So did Barbara Walters.

7. Video: Boogie Board Days on Nantasket Beach with a cameo role by Jonathan Livingston Seagull HERE.

8. Watch the Nantasket Beach tsunami HERE.

9. See my 40th High School Class Reunion Picture, taken last Saturday HERE. My High School Graduation picture is HERE.

10. Judging by the letters in a shoebox on the bottom of my father’s closet (which I’m allowed to read, as the family archivist, two years after his death) he had a lot of girlfriends when he was a nineteen year old WWII soldier, including my mother.

11. The letters are written in pencil. The envelopes are stamped with 3 cent stamps. One is sealed with lipstick kisses.

12. We thought my father looked like Elvis Presley when he was young. What do you think? Look HERE.

13. The Three Musketeers of Gulldom do a BlueMan routine on Nantasket Beach HERE. Next they perform as Larry, Curly, and Moe Gull HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. I like to type “okeedoke” instead of “yes” just to piss off my spell checker.

2. I find the little yellow triangle icon with an exclamation point in it annoying.

3. My Exclamation poem: A kiss with punctuation … indicates excitement … long and thoughtful … to the point … ending quickly … with a flair … the exclamation kiss!

4. THIS was really unsettling, seeing my blog translated into redneck, jive, Elmer Fudd speech, and more…

5. I received a three part meme last week from poet/blogger Felicia Mitchell. The questions and answers are as follows: 1. The last book you purchased? Odd Botany, a book of poetry by Thorpe Moeckel, after he gave a reading at Floyd’s Café Del Sol. 2. The last film/network series DVD you purchased? The movie Elf for my daughter-in-law’s daughter for Christmas. 3. The last music or spoken word recording you purchased? No Promises, a CD by Carla Bruni, in which she sings the words of poems written by poets like Emily Dickinson and more.

6. More press on the Teen Meditation Retreat. This one was written by a recent high school graduate who attended the retreat on assignment for the Virginian Pilot in Norfolk HERE.

7. At first it seemed that my husband Joe had fallen under the seduction of a mistress. Since he took on the task of coordinating on-site parking for FloydFest ‘07, I hadn’t seen him in days. For the past five years, he’s volunteered his time in exchange for a weekend pass, but this year, as the Floyd high school soccer coach, he signed on to head up one of the most intensive behind-the-scenes jobs. In exchange, FloydFest makes a substantial donation to the soccer program to help with the purchase of uniforms and equipment … I knew if I wanted to spend any time with Joe I would have to come into the fold, which meant seeing FloydFest through the windshield of his golf cart. ~ Excerpt from A FloydFest Date, a story I wrote after last year’s FloyFest that appeared in the program this year.

8. At the festival quite a few people who had read the above story came up to me to ask how the date was going. I answered, “Which date? The one with Joe or the one with Governor Warner?" See HERE and HERE.

9. Now that the corn and tomatoes are coming in like gangbusters, ready for picking and eating, it’s hard to pull myself away for my planned trip to Hull, Massachusetts, (the peninsula I grew up on) to visit my family.

10. The good news is that the corn came in just when the cold sore on my lip cleared up, which means I can eat it salted and buttered, painlessly.

11. We get paid in corn for We get paid in corn … for our garden labor … We strike it rich … with every husk … pulled back … The sun has forged … an Aztec banquet … a silky purse … for August gold … More HERE.

12. “Don’t tell people how to live their lives. Just tell stories and they’ll figure out how the story applies to them.” ~ Randy Pausch October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008

13. When we were kids and we’d ask our dad to tell us a story, this is what he’d say: I”ll tell you a story of Jack and the Dory. Now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another of Jack and his brother. Now my story’s all done.

Post notes: The photo above is of the walkie talkie my husband used while working at FloydFest (See and scroll HERE) this year. He knows I collect 13’s and made sure to point it out to me. Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #144.

Posted by Colleen at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

1. The Teen Meditation Retreat that Joe organized and attended last week got a good write-up in the Roanoke Times HERE. It included a large feature photo on the EXTRA front page of Abraham Cherrix (who I interviewed HERE) doing yoga. My own story is coming soon ...

2. Meditation: It’s like combing the hair … of a wild shaggy mind … making a part … untangling the thoughts … to some unruly feelings … that need grooming. More HERE.

3. These days writing has crowded out my own meditation practice. I wake up with sentences wanting to be written down, and writing them down seems important, even more important than my first cup of tea.

4. A few days ago I woke up and the first thing I said to Joe was, “which came first Yogi Bear or Yogi Berra?’

5. Last week I wrote that eating fruit and yogurt in the morning wigs me out like drinking alcohol for breakfast would (because of the sugars). I got some comments and further explained myself, saying at one point that because I have CFS I’m not your average berry-loving bear, which then led to me think about Yogi (which by the way is also what meditaters are called).

6. The results from the Wikipedia: Yogi Berra (whose first name was really Lawrence) picked up his more famous nickname from a friend who said he resembled a Hindu holy man (yogi) they had seen in a movie, whenever Berra sat around with arms and legs crossed waiting to bat, or while looking sad after a losing game. Years later, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Yogi Bear was named after Berra, something Berra did not appreciate after he started being periodically addressed as "Yogi Bear."

7. It goes on: Berra, who quit school in the eighth grade, has a tendency toward malapropism and fracturing the English language in highly provocative, interesting ways. Simultaneously denying and confirming his reputation, Berra once stated, "I never said half the things I really said."

8 Some people have said that I talk like Yogi Berra. And Deana from Friday Night Fish Fry says her way of speaking has been likened to Norm Chomsky. I mean Norm Crosby (see what I mean?)

9. I had to look up Norm Crosby and discovered this about the comedian: King of the malaprop, Norm always speaks from his 'diagram' and drinks ‘decapitated' coffee. His confusing word play and twisted speech has been an audience favorite since his days on The Ed Sullivan Show.

10. Deana thinks Bobby McGee jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge like I try to order New Balance beer at a bar when I really want New Castle.

11. Around the same time I was thinking about Yogi Berra, I also got curious about the poem “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Sugar is Sweet, and So are You,” after titling a recent blog post “Roses Are Red.” The fact that I then spent twenty minutes trying to find out who wrote it and when is why my blog mission statement reads: Whenever I don't know exactly what it is I'm doing and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research.

12. Seems it’s a nursery rhyme written by Anonymous.

13. Wig out HERE with me and Claudia.

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Posted by Colleen at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

1. My new line as of late is: “I’ll bring the cucumbers!” They grow overnight.

2. Working on three stories at once (like I have been this past week) is like juggling apples, oranges, pears.

3. And I’m not working with a full deck. Seeing as how most everyone else gets 52 cards of energy to spend everyday and I only get about 25, I hate having to waste energy doing things like waiting in line for my turn at the computer, which I’ve had to do lately, since my husband, Joe, started working at home too.

4. Joe is a neater gardener than me and he’s been more involved in the garden this year. Walking down the aisle of tall corn and tomatoes that he keeps neatly staked and weeded, I feel like a bride walking down the aisle in my kind of sky ceiling church.

5. Plum is yum and cherry is cheery … But what part of berry is raspy? … Bananas can be split … or cause you to slip … Apples remind me of fall … I figure a fig is easier to figure … than three meanings … of the word date … A lemon could be worthless … Prune could mean cut … A raisin is a grape … But a grapefruit is not … The rest of this fruit loop is HERE.

6. When I was nineteen Yoko Ono’s book “Grapefruit” was like a Bible I carried around with me. HERE.

7. I just heard that The Hotel Floyd manager recently had some guests from Ireland and when he asked them how they heard about the hotel they said they read about Floyd and the hotel in The Observer, a large U.K. newspaper. Check it out HERE.

8. Summer camp is an all-American tradition for so many teens. But what kind of summer camp teaches kindness as part of its curriculum, or instructs campers to disconnect from their high-tech, high paced world in order to sit still and listen? Those are my first lines and as far as I’ve gotten on a story I’m writing on the Teen Meditation Retreat in Stuart that Joe organized this year, hosted by Earthsong Retreat and Organic Farm.

9. Why does Queen Anne’s Lace have one black floret in the middle of the flower? I’ve been wondering that since I was a little girl.

10. In some tribes Native American bead artists add one bead outside the design pattern so as not to lose their soul when gazing at the piece. Is that the answer to number nine?

11. For me, eating fruit and/or yogurt in the morning would be like starting the day with an alcoholic drink (probably due to the fructose and lactose sugars). What I eat for breakfast might be the single most important thing I can do to maintain spending my 25 cards of energy wisely. I need eggs every day.

12. The photo above is of my two month old baby grandson named Bryce, AKA “The apple of my eye.”

13. Everyone appreciated the cucumbers I brought to our Café Del Sol Scrabble game yesterday.

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Posted by Colleen at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. On the Fourth of July, I made a red, white, and blue dessert for my house guest: strawberries, blueberries, and whipped cream!

2. I actually had two house guests over the weekend, one who wore American flag boxers, and the other wore Red Sox ones.

3. I found myself being thankful that it doesn’t take any gas to walk to the mailbox after I made several trips back and forth when the mailman was late.

4. The Rhododendrons on the Blue Ridge Parkway are in peak bloom and my long driveway is lined with them, which makes the walk to get the mail enjoyable. After my last walk, I checked the Wikipedia and found that the word Rhododendron comes from the Greek words for rose and tree. There are over 1000 species, including azaleas. It’s the national flower of Nepal. Photos coming soon …

5. When emails and blog comments come into my mailbox, a bell rings that I imagine is saying “Cha ching.”

6. Every time Mara called over the weekend, my friend who I was providing respite foster care for and who likes to answer the phone, handed it to me after answering, and said, “It’s your sister, Maria.

7. He also said, “I bet you wore bib overalls in high school.”

8. How wrong was he? I teased my hair and wore black fish net stocking.

9. June emailed me THESE very cool creative painted hand photos. And THIS was my attempt at the same.

10. After posting about thrift shopping while listening to Warren Zevon’s Werewolves in London, I did some research and listened to some Zevon songs because anyone who writes lyrics like: I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand … walkin through the streets of Soho in the rain … gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein … is interesting to me.

11. Zevon, who experienced a range of successes and failures, rehab, and more than one comeback, wrote lyrics like John Prine, but darker. With prophetic songs like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and an album called “Life’ll Kill Ya,” Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 2002 and died in 2003. His insight on facing death, coined on the David Letterman Show: Enjoy every sandwich.

12. I know THIS is over the top. But I’m posting it for my Asheville Potter son Josh (who at one time wore smiley face boxers) because it’s his birthday, and I think he’ll find it almost as funny as the Napoleon Dynamite talking birthday card I sent him. Happy Birthday, Josh!

13. And THIS is only almost over the top: Seems Jim Carrey recently went to the beach wearing his girlfriend Jenny McCarthy’s bathing suit. (Scroll down for the up close view.)

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #141

Posted by Colleen at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

1. You know when you forget someone’s name and no matter how hard you try, even if it’s on the tip of your tongue, you can’t remember. Then you go off and do something else and the name just pops in your head? Writing poetry is like that.

2. At Johanna and Nick’s wedding, my friend Eli, who works at the Chinese Medicine Clinic I go to, was massaging my injured ankle. “I’ve hurt this ankle before. Well, you know my chart,” I said to him. “I try not to think about people charts when I’m at a wedding,” he answered. “And I try not to write stories about people when at a wedding, but once I get home anything goes," I answered. And it did. See HERE.

3. Years ago when I worked in day care there was a little boy who had been born on the Fourth of July. His middle name was Boom.

4. Last year at a fourth of July party I got THIS close to a shark.

5. Live fireworks HERE.

6. You’ve heard of Girls Gone Wild? THIS is Wild Girls in Need of a Hairdresser, starring yours truly.

7. My blog roll is starting to feel like my closet, kinda overstuffed with stuff I’m not using.

8. The jury is still out on my new answering machine message. Jayn likes it; Mara can’t get used to it because it doesn’t elicit poetic answers like my last one and won’t make me any friends, she says.

9. This is it: People who work at home … Don’t answer the phone … At least not right away … Do I need to pick up? … Call you right back? … After the beep have your say …

10. I tend to putter and stutter before the flutter of keys on the keyboard each day.

11. Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. ~ George Carlin

12. David Letterman on George Bush: We should get our money back on that guy, don’t you think?

13. The photo above, taken at the Spoken Word this past Saturday night, is of Mara’s signature cargo pants with a 13 signature written on them, and my signature notebook. Also pictured are my remedies for public speaking phobia: a bottle of rescue remedy and a dark beer. More on that phobia HERE.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #140

Posted by Colleen at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

1. Hung-over with fun from the wedding on Saturday, I dragged myself to a Woman’s Clothing Exchange the next day. Over a dozen women came and dumped piles of clothes all over my friend Penny’s living room for a real Filenes’s Basement experience. I didn’t have the energy to organize a fashion show shot of all of us in our newly acquired recycled clothes like I did at the last one HERE.

2. Isn’t it ironic that you need your glasses in order to see well enough to find your glasses?

3. What ever happened to the Crash Test Dummies? I found their website and discovered that they’re still making music, but none of it has had the same commercial success that God Shuffled His Feet had. The song that plays on their website seems to tell it all: I’m laying down … I’m playing dead … I ain’t fetching any stick … No way baby.

4. Remember Wavy Gravy, the clown at Woodstock, famous for saying what we have in mind is breakfast for 400,000? I met Wavy a few years back when he was in Floyd and was MC-ing FloydFest. He’s still a clown and went around the festival with a toy alligator on a leash.

5. Where else but in Floyd could you learn from an old-timer how to forage ginseng one day and then meet Wavy Gravy, the Woodstock clown with an ice-cream flavor named after him, in town for Floyd Fest the next? ~ From Homegrown, a WVTF Radio Essay HERE.

6. I was invited by Poetkat to do a meme in which I name seven songs that are shaping my summer. Not counting the wood thrush and other birdsong, I’ve been listening to my brand new playlist, started when Joe got me my first Ipod for my birthday in May. Songs include: Tomorrow People by Ziggy Marley, It’s in the Way that You Use It by Eric Clapton, Mr. Jones by Counting Crows, My Favorite Mistake by Sheryl Crow, Good People by Jack Johnson, Building a Mystery by Sarah Mclachlan, Back to the Garden by Neil Young, and Your Life is Now John Mellencamp. How about you?

7. I’ve recently been curious about Tim Russert’s playlist, after I read something referring to it online. I’m pretty sure it included music by Bruce Springsteen. It was no secret that Russert liked the Boss, and, judging by the tribute that Springsteen gave to Russert at his Memorial Service HERE, Springsteen liked Russert too.

8. I have an affinity for both Russert and Springsteen. They’re both my age, and like me, both came from working class Catholic families in the northeast. Russert was Irish Catholic and Springsteen is Irish/Italian Catholic. No wonder they both always felt so familiar.

9. I consider certain songs at certain times in my life as “medicine songs,” and I use them to raise energy. I manifested my husband Joe by singing and dancing to Steve Winwood’s Higher Love over and over. When I told my sister Tricia this, she said she also manifested her husband with the same song. Her friend, who was single at the time, wanted to try it, so we played it and sang and danced together. Tricia’s friend is married now.

10. I think of George Carlin as the Willie Nelson of comedy. Both were/are progressives with ponytails, and both were/are undeniably recognizable as one-of-a-kind in their genres. After George Carlin died, Jon Stewart said, "I'm getting awfully tired of people we need, leaving us.” Carlin's humor and insight will be missed.

11. I learned what’s on Barrack Obama’s playlist while watching Charlie Rose on Tuesday night. Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner was on the show and had just interviewed Barrack for the magazine. He reported that Barrack had 30 Bob Dylan songs on his IPod, along with some Earth Wind and Fire and Yo-Yo Ma.

12. This year’s FloydFest is July 24-27. Check out the music roster HERE. And HERE are two past FloydFest posts in which my friend Johanna (whose wedding I just went to) and her ponytail figure in.

13. Rock the boat with your cursor HERE, compliments of my sister Sherry.

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Posted by Colleen at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

1. At the beach Joe said to me, “I’m so glad you introduced me to naps, baths, and beaches.” Yeah, that about sums me up.

2. I didn’t think of my father, who died in 2005, very much on Father’s Day. But the next morning, upon waking and while still in-between the dream world and this one, I felt him (or the lack of him) and whispered “Happy Father’s Dad, daddy.”

3. THIS is the song I want played at my funeral.

4. “What do you want to do before you die?” AKA “It’s amazing what people do when you give them the chance to be a hero” HERE.

5. One of the things I’d like to do before I die is help Janet meet Johnny Depp before she dies. She’s very “Fond of Snape” and Depp.

6. I recently realized while looking through my stockpile of greeting cards that sympathy cards now outnumber the birthday cards.

7. After covering a story on the 300th year anniversary of the Brethren church, I realized that preaching is a lot like stand-up comedy, although none the Catholic priests of my past were very funny.

8. Hail Mary Full of Grapes: When we were kids there was no question, we had to go to church and catechism classes too. The best part of going to church was my First Holy Communion, when I first received the host, which represents the body of Christ. I felt like a bride all dressed in white, complete with the mysterious veil. After my First Holy Communion, I was old enough to help the younger ones study their catechism lessons. But one day, my dad overheard me teaching them their first prayers…Hail Mary, Full of grapes, The Lord is with thee… This sounded right to me, especially considering that it was soon followed by the line…blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. At seven years old, the word “womb” was over my head, but I surely knew what fruit was. ~ Excerpt from my book The Jim and Dan Stories

9. I had a great time in Virginia Beach last week but was sorry to miss going to the Floyd Library’s celebration of the new library addition where Grammy Award winning poet Nikki Giovanni spoke. June from Spatter got some great shots HERE. I wrote about Nikki in a post called How to be a Better Writer HERE.

10. My friend Jayn and I named the June Museletter (our community newsletter) “Flutterby.” That’s what she used to call a butterfly when she was a girl.

11. In a recent Larry King's interview with Jon Stewart, King asked Stewart if he thought America was ready for a woman or a black president. Jon looked at him quizzically and said 'This is such a non-question. Did anyone ask us in 2000 if Americans were ready for a moron?'

12. A Life Milestone: On Father’s Day, I talked with my son Dylan on the phone and wished him his very first Father’s Day. The latest video clip of my grandson Bryce, born May 14th, is HERE.

13. Driving home from the beach Joe and I were listening to a tape by archetypal psychologist, James Hillman. My favorite part was when Hillman said this about himself: “If Hillman were not, he would have to be invented.” I think that applies to all of us.

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Posted by Colleen at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (31)

1. Blogging helps me know what day it is, which I wouldn’t know otherwise because I don’t have a regular job, and I especially don’t know when I’m at the beach, which I am now.

2. Yesterday I was browsing through “Virginia Living” magazine and found this interesting story about Edgar Allen Poe: A bust of Poe was unveiled in 1909 for the museum and garden dedicated to him in Richmond, Virginia. The bust was stolen and soon after, the museum got a call from the thief. He agreed to tell museum authorities where they would find the bust, but only after he was read Poe’s poem, The Spirit of the Dead, out loud over the phone. After the reading, he directed the authorities to The Raven Pub. The bust was found there on the bar, where the caller had bought it a beer.

3. According to Floyd legend, Edgar Allen Poe had a girlfriend in Floyd that he used to visit and who is now buried in the Old Jacksonville Cemetery.

4. Add a T to Poe and it says Poet.

5. Lately I’ve been getting more spam comments than blog comments, which can make me feel strangely more popular than if I was getting no comments at all.

6. I’ve also been reading Gift from the Sea, a book that I’ve had for thirty years but haven’t read up until now. This is what you do on vacation.

7. The beach is not a place to work, to read, write or think. I should have remembered that from other years. Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp or sharp flights of spirit. One never learns. Hopefully, one carries down the faded straw bag, lumpy with books, clean paper, long over-due unanswered letters, freshly sharpened pencils, lists and good intentions. The books remain unread, the pencils break their points and the pads rest smooth and unblemished as the cloudless sky. No reading, no writing, no thoughts even – at least, not at first. ~ Excerpt from Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

8. Contrary to the above excerpt, I got lots of writing done at the beach today.

9. I was hoping to finish a Gestalt around my ankle injury, a reoccurring injury that is related to going to the ocean (a representation of the mother), but it turned out to be just another experience of limping around in the sand.

10. Question asked to Joe by Colleen after she injured her ankle: “So where do think the foot reflexology point for the foot is on the foot?”

11. I was visiting someone’s blog recently and saw the name June in a comment. For a moment, I thought it was my blog friend June from Spatter, but with a second look I realized it was the date, with June being the month we’re in.

12. Favorite quote found in the blogsphere this week: "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." Ray Bradbury

13. Go get your feet wet HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

1. I’ve never been very sports-minded. It’s taken THIS recent injury to my leg to get me in soccer knee pads. They come in handy when I have to crawl on all fours to get around.

2. Since I’ve hurt my leg and taken to crawling, I’ve noticed how dirty it is down here on the floor.

3. On the third day of my injury, Joe was able to track down some crutches for me. I also use a wheeled office chair to scoot around the kitchen.

4. So much for our IPOD living room Dance Parties. Maybe I can get Joe to vacuum to “What’s the Frequency Kenneth.”

5. If you Image Google “The Dog Ate My Homework” THIS is what you’ll see.

6. I pretty much used to get all A’s in school until Algebra came along. Algebra and trying to solve complicated math word problems made me feel like I was going to have a seizure. I later learned I had THIS.

7. Barack Obama has a Facebook page, which is where I learned that he’s a Leo and his favorite musicians are Miles Davis; John Coltrane; Bob Dylan; and Stevie Wonder.

8. Not being able to walk made Steven Tyler’s song “Walk this Way” come to mind. I think Tyler looks like Chrissie Hynde with Mick Jagger’s lips. I should know. I saw him up real close. That story is HERE.

9. Remembering Summer Through my Feet: Growing up on a peninsula in Hull, Massachusetts, my whole body was immersed in water for most of the summer. My feet would flap like flippers through the cool dark liquid bay, while I imagined I was a seal or a mermaid. I recall the feeling of sand through my toes and the sticky residue of dried salt water on my body and in my hair. I can still remember my revelation when, as a young girl, I licked my own skin and tasted the ocean. ~Excerpt from a WVTF Radio Essay, which can be read in its entirety HERE.

10. A Not So Stupid Dog Trick: The best I’ve come across HERE.

11. In the News: Green our Vaccines March on Washington, rally, with keynote address by Robert Kennedy Jr. Watch an ABC video with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey HERE.

12. What’s the end product of all this progress in the name of profit? What does it provide or promote? At what expense do we proceed? Is our progress really greed? Can we progress to produce less? Will our children be prosperous? Can we promise? ~ Excerpt from a poem I wrote in 1990, called “The Pros and Cons of Progress.”

13. Yes We Can: HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

1. Printer’s ink is to a writer what gas is to a trucker. And it costs almost as much.

2. If you wake up and get on the computer too early, your typing might look like this: Mpr of ujt uo,t hpy d;; jpg ,tm up bp,t up ujtog dog ph ujt bpimuiy/

3. Ever since Joe got me an Ipod for my birthday, he’s been wanting to have one of our “Dance Parties,” (that’s when we play loud music and dance around in our living room), but I’ve been too busy or tired. Early Memorial Day morning, he was sleeping in. I woke him, saying, “Wake up, Joe. It’s time to have the dance party!” He laughed, turned over, and fell back asleep.

4. I really want THIS for my next birthday.

5. I recently discovered that posting photos of a new baby is good for blog traffic and comments. When I posted some of my first grandchild, Bryce, I got 36 well-wishing comments. Thank you everyone!

6. This week I sent my niece a letter. She lives on Batman Thumper Road. No kidding.

7. THIS is my favorite Youtube video as of late. I found it after posting THESE Fun House photos (taken at the mirrored elevator at Roanoke Memorial Hospital) and then doing some google research on glass elevators.

8. I had a game of Scrabble with Mara yesterday. Usually when we play, I take notes of things we say -- ideas for poems or blog posts. But this time we talked about sex and crushes and subjects that begin with, “Don’t repeat this to anyone, but …” I never wrote a thing down, not even the score. Mara did that.

9. Joe and I finally had our dance party last night. We danced to My Favorite Mistake by Sheryl Crow, Higher Love by Steve Winwood, Tomorrow People by Ziggy Marley, It's in the Way That You Use it by Eric Clapton, and What’s the Frequency Kenneth by REM (three times).

10. I got tagged by Greenish Lady for this 1-2-3 meme: 1. Pick up the nearest book. 2. Turn to page 123. 3. Find the fifth sentence and post the next three sentences. I picked up Bruce Weigl’s 2000 memoir (still on my desk after meeting him HERE), which deals with his service in the Vietnam War and his later return to the country: I want to tell you how it feels to stroll in a common zone among the people of your life after war. I want to tell you about the faith that it takes to come back and be among the sweetly uninitiated and to live as if calm or sane. Coming back to America, which I still loved in 1968, was like returning to a foreign land. (Let me know if you try this meme so I can come read your page 123.)

11. Claudia from Open Grove audio magazine and Out on a Limb blog has put out a call to book authors to share their experiences with publishing and marketing. She’s interested in collecting information on mainstream publishing, self-publishing, or e-book publishing and hopes to publish a resource guide sharing first hand accounts of what works and doesn’t work when selling books. Details are HERE.

12. My answers to some of Claudia’s questions can be found in these past posts: The Power of Print, Drive by Sales, and The Book: Fulfilling its Higher Purpose. Click on the titles to read more.

13. I feel bad that the photos of my new grandson just went off the front page, which is why I posted the new photo above of Bryce in blue. THIS is my bluest poem.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. I find myself going to my own blog just to look at photos of my new grandson.

2. While in the hospital visiting my son, daughter-in-law, and their new baby, I saw an old clip on the hospital TV of Anita Bryant getting hit in the face with a pie. When I got home, I googled pie-throwing to learn more about its history. It began as slapstick shtick in silent movies and later became a way to make a political statement. I know Anita was out to lunch, but pie all over her face?

3. What would you do if someone threw a pie in your face? Anita prayed for the pie thrower, Thomas Friedman walked off stage, Ralph Nader threw it back, and Ann Coulter (successfully) ran away.

4. Some people have no taste and will use others misfortune to make a joke. I’ve seen some comments on the internet recently suggesting that Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor might have been responsible for his endorsement of Barack Obama. Kennedy (whose grandparents once owned a home in Hull, Massachusetts, where I grew up) has said that he endorsed Obama because Obama inspires him and reminds him of another time in history and someone else who inspired others, his brother JFK. Kennedy also said this about Obama as president: I believe we will move beyond the politics of fear and personal destruction and unite our country with the politics of common purpose.

5. I hope he lives to see it.

6. This is the poem I posted yesterday: A muse infused … pot full of tea … must be why Buddha … is smiling. And this is how Edgar Allen Poe would edit the same poem: A muse infused pot full of agony; even in the GALLOWS! In a swoon-- fables I saw!

7. Lewis Carroll: A muse infused pot full of tea must be called an egg. You sha'n't be beheaded! Get your own poems edited by Poe, Carroll, Mark Twain, Hunter Thomas, and even God and Dr. Seuss HERE.

8. Virginia Senator Jim Webb is also a novelist. He said this about being writer to Terry Gross in a recent NPR interview: I’m principally a writer. The process of writing is the same analytical process that I use in making decisions in the Senate … I’m able to take some of these complex issues and deal with them the same way you do as a writer, which is, you think about them, you interview people, you take your time in terms of coming to a conclusion, but then when you write it down you know you have to live with it. I basically am, in my persona, a writer, someone who likes to think deeply and go on the record as clearly as I can.

9. He also said this about his stint in the Naval Academy where he minored in Literature: I started reading the people that I thought were the greats, people like Steinbeck, Hemmingway, Faulkner. One of the things that really jumped out at me was how few of them had a formal education. If you were going to go out and get a PHD in literature, you become an expert on a theme or a person, but if you’re going to create, if you’re going to write you have to go out and live.

10. And he can write. During the interview he read this opening paragraph from his 1978 novel, Fields of Fire, about a character named Snake who was about to roll a heroin addict: There he went again. Smack man came unfocused in the middle of a word. The unformed syllable of dribble of bubbly spit along his chin and leaned forward that sudden rush of ecstasy so slow and deep it put him out. His knees bent a little and he stood there motionless, styled-out in a violet suit and turquoise high heeled shoes. He had the wave and his hair was so perfectly frozen in place that he seemed a mimic sculpture of himself, standing there all still with scag. The whole interview was good. Listen HERE.

11. Joe and I once thought of opening a shop on the Blue Ridge Parkway, selling baked goods and renting bikes. We’d call it “The Bikery.”

12. Pie goes good with tea but not if the pie’s in the sky or in the face.

13. Have you met Patry at Simply Wait? She’s a wonderful writer who bakes blueberry pies for her muse.

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#134

Posted by Colleen at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

1. The moon is poetry to the sun’s prose, shining indirectly but penetrating deeply.

2. Why do so many writers hold their hand up to the side of their face in their book jacket photos? Have you ever posed like that in the mirror just to see how it looks?

3. Comment to my blog friend Bonnie after seeing a photo of the work soil preparation she’s doing on her garden: “I’ll be posting a dirty picture of me soon.” HERE

4. I’ve been alternating gardening and writing and thinking how much typos are like weeds and weeds are like typos that I have to edit out.

5. “Our real poems are already in us and all we can do is dig,” said Jonathan Galassi.

6. My upstairs computer turns itself on when the phone rings. I just figured out that I can call myself in the morning before going up to work so that the computer is warmed up and read to go.

7. Mara on graduation ceremonies: I love the circumstance but not the pomp.

8. Obama on McCain: We can’t afford to let John McCain serve out George Bush’s third term.

9. And I am stuffed with facts … overweight with the nightly news …. Poetry is the bell … that saves me from being all consumed. ~ From Political Prose is Hard Labor by Colleen

10. Can you Dig THIS?

11. What has the world come to? If you type “muse” in an image search THIS comes up. So does THIS.

12. I have an imaginary poetry troupe called the Edgar Allen Poets.

13.You don’t need a fridge to play with THIS virtual poetry.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

1. I was recently typing the name of my book of poems, Muses Like Moonlight, and typed "Mooses Like Moonlight" by mistake.

2. Written on the inside on my latest notebook: Note to self – in writing.

3. I can understand why my youtube video of the Hokie Wave Cheer at the Dave Matthews and John Meyer concert at VA Tech has gotten nearly 2,000 hits. What I don’t understand is why THIS video has gotten almost as many.

4. I wasn’t kidding about getting drunk on the aroma of apple blossoms while visiting an orchard on the Parkway HERE. The next day I even had a hangover from breathing all that pollen.

5. I was sipping tea on the front porch today when a cloud of pollen that looked like smoke passed by. It caused me to question for a second whether I was crazy enough to have lit the wood stove and forgot. I didn’t think so because it was nearly 80 degrees.

6. Mara says we need to bring some mud to our next spoken word night. Her idea was prompted by reading Tom Ryan’s latest issue of The Floyd Enquirer, in which he reported this: A full contact mud wrestling poetry slam has been scheduled for the title “High Priestess of Poetry”. The crowd favorite seems to be Mara “Drama-O-Rama” Robbins but the smart money is split between Colleen “Soul Crusher” Redman & Katherine “TeaTime” Chantal.

7. And about Floyd Fest, there was this Tomfoolery by Tom: It was nice to see that Kris & Erika were able to negotiate a “non-presence” of the Federal Interdiction Anti-Fun Force at this year’s festival (Floyd Fest). I was a little taken aback, however, to learn of the myriad compromises they made in reaching that accord. Changing the festival theme from “A Family Affair” to “A Family Values Affair” was bad enough but allowing Pat Robertson to M.C. and letting Dick Cheney sit in with Donna The Buffalo to perform “Ubber Deutschland” are bound to have a chilling effect on the festivals ambiance. I guess I can learn to live with these concessions but I was aghast at The National Rifle Association becoming the primary sponsor & forcing all staff to wear “Don’t Inhale” T-shirts. You can read the full online tell-all HERE.

8. A real 9/ll Call: "We made brownies and I think we’re dead.” More of this hilarity is HERE.

9. Michael Moore on Larry King talking about Obama’s relationship with Reverend Wright: Jeez, you know, I mean I go to Mass still. I'm a practicing Catholic. I've been that way all my life. But if I had -- if I had gotten up every time I heard a priest from the pulpit in my travels around the country say things like I've heard them say, that birth control is a sin, that women should not be priests, that women should have a different role in church ... I would have been walking out so much -- that would have been so much aerobic activity for me ... I wouldn't look like this.

10. In the nearly three years I’ve been doing Thirteen Thursday, I actually forgot it was Thursday once and posted on Friday. My excuse: “I thought yesterday was Wednesday, which would make today Thursday, but of course it’s really Friday. Everybody says so."

11. Have you seen the human clock? It runs continuously and changes ever moment with photo scenes people have sent in from around the world telling the time.

12. Also from my Thirteen Thursday on Friday: "I’ve always been fascinated by the group mind that humans share, which causes us to agree about certain things like what day of the week it is, or to stay in our own lane on the right side of the road while driving down a highway. What would happen if we completely dropped out and forgot these collective agreements?"

13. In August 2006 I wrote this: “I think of blogging as rapid fire target practice. Doing it daily, I can't help but improve my writer's aim, but sometimes my arm gets tired!” Hey, I guess that means I should have carpal tunnel by now.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

1. New motto for my overbooked husband: "No" is a complete sentence.

2. Handwritten on the inside cover of my book of Mary Oliver’s poems: The poet’s answer to Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings.

3. Seen on a Get Well Greeting Card at the Pharmacy: “Don’t worry – Stressed is just Desserts spelled backwards.”

4. Flamingos remind me of long legged ballerinas in pink tutus.

5. I have never played pool but I play in the pool. I like the 8 beach ball the best.

6. It was so cold the other day that I had to start a fire in the wood stove. While crumpling newspaper, I noticed a Washington Post photo of the Pope’s red shoes. The caption beneath it said, “There’s no place like Rome: Pope Benedict XVI arriving at Andrews Air Force Base with his ruby red slippers, rumored to be Prada.”

7. I was so jealous.

8. Best quote about the Pope’s red shoes came from a woman in Central Park: “He’s got big shoes to fill and the red shoes are just the ticket to do that.” There’s also a song about them HERE.

9. Funny how the pope’s hat is almost like a wizard’s and a wizard’s hat is the same as a dunce’s.

10. A witch’s hat and church steeple also have a point in common.

11. HERE’S my blog friend Rick Mullen reading his poem, “The Chelsea,” from his newly published chapbook “Aquinas Flinched.”

12. My shoes aren’t red but my last name is.

13. My favorite burgundy silk pajamas were recently spotted HERE.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #131

Posted by Colleen at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

1. Black tea is like whiskey to herb tea’s wine.

2. I don’t like chocolate for the sake of it. For me, chocolate is like a condiment to go with mint, peanut butter, ice cream, or cherries.

3. I never had a baby shower or wedding shower. But I do love baths.

4. I have an imaginary green shamrock tattoo somewhere on my body, haven’t imagined where yet.

5. Emily Dickinson’s version of making the sign of the cross (In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost) is: “In the name of the Birds, the Bees, and the Breeze,” (taught to me by a monk in South Carolina).

6. I talked to my friend Jayn (turning 60 this year) on the phone; it had been awhile. She said, “My life has been so full.” I answered, “Yeah, and we get full faster than we used to.

7. Last Sunday night Joe and I went dancing to the Emily Brass Band at the Pine Tavern. We slept in late the next morning. When we woke up, I said to him, “Joe, it’s Monday. Do you know where your job is?”

8. Interesting fact heard on David Letterman: 95% of people texting and blogging who type LOL are actually NOT laughing out loud.

9. Upsetting use of adversity in TV advertising heard recently: Stop global warming or all the Reese’s Cups will melt.

10. Not only did I used to love Led Zepplin’s song “Ramble On” when I was a teenager, I also drove a Rambler. Does anyone remember those?

11. I’ve decided to name my computer “The Enterprise,” and think of my work station as the “bridge,” although I’m more of a nutty professor in a word lab than a Captain Kirk exploring outer space.

12. Today I love the word “warp,” as in warp drive, warp speed, and warp spasm; and when I googled an image search for “warp,” I got THIS!”

13. If celebrities moved to Oklahoma HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (30)

1. Tongue twister created after I played AI (a three legged sloth) twice in one Scrabble play, which caused Mara to squeal, “Two three legged sloths … Two three legged sloths … Two three legged sloths.”

2. When I tried to say “two three legged sloths” three times fast, it kept coming out as something ending with “sluts,” which reminded Mara of the bar drink she had when we were in Lexington, called “a redheaded slut.”

3. “The bees are disappearing, independent bookstores are closing, and they’re selling botox on TV to women in their 30’s!” I recently ranted to my friend Alwyn over the phone.

4. When I played the word QUEUE in our last Scrabble game, Mara and Rosemary broke out in song, singing, “Q-U-E-U-E whatever will be will be … the future’s not ours to see … Q-U-E-U-E.

5. Favorite quote from Claudia Emerson’s VPI Poetry Symposium keynote address: Sometimes the line will agree with the sentence and sometimes the sentence will argue with the line.

6. Joe and I tend to argue about stuff like whether something is purple or blue, or is that blue and green?

7. When it comes to my bad back it’s more about what I don’t do than what I do. In other words, less sitting and more moving.

8. I dream in fiction.

9. Last night I dreamt of blogger Michele Agnew (of Meet and Greet fame). She had a new blog, designed from an online survey she took. The details were posted on a bulletin board at the New Mountain Mercantile, here in Floyd. I was in there picking up my farm eggs and was telling someone that I knew her. I had a bicycle outside and was on my way to Christiansburg, but then it started to rain. When I woke up I was trying to figure out how to get home to get my car without getting wet (I live 7 miles from town).

10. While doing some research on local blues musician, Scott Perry, who was quoted in my story about the arts in Floyd, I discovered he has written a song called Floyd County Rag. Here.

11. My mind just went blank. Then I thought of the T-shirt my son Josh brought home from London that said “Mind the Gap,” taken from signs at the London Underground. In this country the underground is called the subway and our signs read, “Watch Your Step.” My T-shirt should probably say “Mind the Lapse.”

12. Some Mind Game architecture HERE and HERE.

13. Winter Tax Refunded in the Spring (AKA The Audit): In April I calculate poetry … the way others do their taxes … as though the world were overdue for a good accounting … Bursting to put into words … what the birds already know … with each emerging daffodil … I mark spring’s growing windfall … Its affluent bloom … and excess of green are annual assets … we all get to claim.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. #129

Posted by Colleen at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)

1. Seeing poets Bruce Weigl and Claudia Emerson together at the VMI Poetry Symposium last weekend was as cool as seeing James Taylor and Carole King together in concert back in the 70’s.

2. Over the two-day symposium weekend there was a humorous discussion between Mara and me about the difference between pulpit and podium. The subject of punctuation and poetry also surfaced and took the form of a heated debate after Claudia Emerson spoke of the importance of it in her keynote address.

3. But William Carlos Williams, who Claudia mentioned in her address, often didn’t use punctuation, and Emily Dickinson, who Claudia named as one of her poet heroes, used liberal dashes of various sizes dashes, some of which editors took out after she died when they were adding punctuation.

4. As one who doesn’t use much punctuation in my poetry I’m a minority in the crowd, riding in the back of the bus: And in the end I’m like Rosa Parks … I don’t want to get up and go where I’m told … I work just as hard as any other poet … and I write from where I sit. More HERE.

5. How gullible are you? A test guaranteed to make you laugh HERE.

6. After Bruce Weigl's and (Pulitzer Prize winning poet) Claudia Emerson’s readings and during the question and answer period, a student referred to Bruce as famous, to which Bruce quickly responded, saying that he was not famous, expect for high school, where he was famous for some things he did in sports.

7. I’ve been having a hard time reading the notes I took at the symposium, but I was able to make out this, said by Weigl about the Iraq War: “Sacrifice and slaughter are not the same thing.” He also said this about his Vietnam War service: “The war made me stupid and only good enough to clean windows.”

8. I love that Claudia openly admits that she was a hippie living out the country with woodstove heating and no electricity. Her current husband is a long haired musician who reminds me of David Crosby and looks like he’d fit well in Floyd, which is Mara’s and my latest fantasy (after the one about Sy Safransky, editor of The Sun Magazine, falling in love with Mara).

9. Last year at Floyd Fest, we drove to and from THIS poetry performance in what we were calling the poetry bus (see above photo).

10. The one driving the poetry bus gets to decide if poetry should be punctuated or not.

11. Most interesting keyword search at Loose Leaf Notes this week that made me wonder what the searcher was thinking and which of the two words they really meant when they misspelled: “how to get a “viginia” loose.”

12. A poem I wrote about fishing, posted here just so the title makes sense: Poems so short … I throw them back … but they nibble again … to break my heart … “There’s other fish in the sea” I tell them.

13. Someone once asked me to write a poem about a button. This is my button poem, always a good poem to close a reading or a 13 Thursday list with: I should know by now … how to button my lip … just go zip … and close it.

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Posted by Colleen at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

1. On April fool’s day I wrote this fake news story: A fool resembling Donald Trump announced on April 1st that Thursday had been fired. People in board rooms across America were stunned at the turn of events and feared the lost revenue that would ensue. CEOs scrambled to book Friday, which overflowed into Saturday, and bloggers who play Thirteen Thursday didn’t know what to do with themselves.

2. My egg man, Ed, called me from town Monday morning to say that he couldn’t drop off my farm fresh eggs at the New Mountain Mercantile because a criminal was loose in the county and the Mercantile, among other places, was locked down. “Is it really that bad?” I asked him. “I’m not worried. I have eggs. If I see him I’ll throw them,” he answered.

3. A rude awakening: The growth in Floyd over the past several years has its pros and cons. I was recently parked in the new (full) downtown parking lot in between two other cars and instinctively locked my car door, thinking I was in Christiansburg. It’s the first time that has happened.

4. My friend Katherine and I talked about meeting early so we could have some time to catch up before we headed to our writer’s circle on Sunday, but by the time I pulled up her driveway, I had this to say. “My idea of being early is not being late.”

5. When I was a girl I was very curious about things like the Immaculate Conception and the quick brown fox that jumped over the lazy dog.

6. At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of such a strange sentence or why I was made to write it out over and over in Penmanship class. Now I know that the phrase is a pangram, a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. Besides being used to practice penmanship it was used to test the letters on a typewriter.

7. This is a first: I’ve been given a blog award by Claudia from On a Limb for being “Mountain Sexy.”

8. At a red light in Christiansburg, watching a young man saunter across the street, I thought to myself, ‘Imagine having nothing better to do but develop and perfect a cool walk.’

9. THIS is what I hear when I walk to mailbox. Can you guess what it is?

10. Favorite word of the week: Conniption. I remembered it after Deana said something about a “hissy fit.”

11. Found while I was picking up my award from Claudia: After 7 years and 500 interviews, a two hour presentation on the secrets of success is presented in 3 minutes HERE.

12. I couldn’t help notice that he went over 3 minute time limit. If he was at a poetry slam, points would be deducted.

13. I’m going to a Poetry Symposium this weekend with my Scrabble playing poet friend Mara, who is a student at Hollins University and will be presenting poetry and a paper. Soon I’ll be blogging from a front row seat at VMI, a great way to ring in National Poetry month.

Post notes: Ironically, my blog was down for two hours this morning and so, as far as I'm concerned, Thursday was almost canceled. Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)

1. Have you ever thought of getting a “13” tattoo, taking a picture of it and using it for a Thirteen Thursday header?

2. According to THIS test (compliments of Kenju), I’m 76% addicted to blogging.

3. If that isn’t bad enough, I think I’m even more addicted to online research. After typing number 1 in this list, I searched around and found out that there is a place called Lucky 13 Tattoo in Richmond, Virginia, another Lucky 13 Tattoo in Vermont, a 13 Tattoo in Brazil and an Old Thirteen Tattoo place in Los Angeles. There’s also a Lucky 13 Hairdressers Salon.

4. Our names are our assignments: Last week while doing some research on autism and vaccines, I came across a doctor named “Pangborn.” He works with autistic children, but I couldn’t help but think maybe he missed his calling and should have been an obstetrician.

5. Then I found THIS, a story called “Calling These Doctors by Their Callings,” about a surgeon named Chop, a Psychiatrist named Dr. Looney, and doctors named Dr. Hurt and Dr. Payne. There was mention of an eye doctor named Dr. Blinder and one named Dr. Seemore. Which one would you choose?

6. Dick Cheney must be pulling our chain (no comment on his first name). Last week when Martha Radditz said to him in an interview, “Two-thirds of Americans say it (the war) is not worth fighting,” he said, “SO?” Then he went on to tell her how well the war was going. Can anyone watch THIS without cringing?

7. I should have bought stock in THESE notebooks. through a few and whenever I really like something and go back to buy more, I find they have gone out of style.

8. Besides being a beachnick and 1960’s peacnick, I’m a Meet and Greetnick. Meet Michele HERE.

9. I just found out that the poems we all wrote last week using the words in our last Café Scrabble game are going to be used by Mara in creative writing class assignment on “procedural poems” at Hollins University. I guess I was taking my turn when she explained it.

10. At first the Literacy Volunteer Scrabble Tournament that I wrote about HERE reminded me of a Contra Dance. There were five long lines of five round tables like contra dance lines and partners and neighbors holding hands four in a circle. Not only that, a literacy volunteer was up on the stage calling the rules that I was struggling to understand.

11. My son Josh got me into Contra Dancing when he was a teenager. I love to dance but being left/right dyslexic, it was difficult for me to learn. There are active and inactive dancers who move up the dance hall in different directions. There’s counting steps, and spinning and dosey doeing left or right. I remember being confused and complaining that it was too much like algebra, but when your teenaged son says, “Mom, you’re gonna love this,” and he wants you to learn it and he’ll dance with you when you do, you’ll make the effort to.

12. Today is my niece’s birthday, and she has a blog. You can go over and wish here a happy birthday HERE, and she'll tell you how old she is.

13. Strangest keyword searches that brought people to Loose Leaf this week: flamingo sympathy card, leprechaun on the loose, 5 biggest lies Bush told us about iraq, and what are the 13 colleens. The funniest part is that I know exactly why they landed folks here.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. Said to my friend Rosemary at Spoken Word Night while holding my amber Anchor Steam up to the light: “I think it’s funny that I love tea and beer and they’re both the same color, which makes me wonder if it’s really the color I love.”

2. Last weekend Joe had to take a porch vacation on his own. Not only was I working – providing support for an individual with disabilities – it was spoken word weekend, AND I went to TWO baby showers (the last one I went to before these two was probably 30 years ago).

3. The Charlie’s Angels of Scrabble Poetry mission, assigned by Mara and called “Procedure for Scrabble Poem,” had four of us who played on Monday writing poems from the words we played, most of which can be read HERE.

4. And this little stanza used up five of the Scrabble words we played: Heat up the leftovers … Serve them to a foe… Turn war into warm … Edit bet into better … and id into idea …

5.Click HERE to fall in love with kaleidoscopes and flowers.

6. I find it nearly impossible to look in the mirror without tilting my head. I have no idea why. So said “Internal Monoblog,” quoted Blogations.

7. You should see the face I make when I’m putting on eye makeup. I try not to do it because it’s sort of a bug-eyed frown but I can’t seem to break the habit.

8. Remember when you fed your babies oatmeal and you opened your own mouth as if you were the one eating?

9. With one in every 150 children being diagnosed with autism, we should be talking about the cumulative effect that so many vaccines could be having on our children. We know antibiotics save lives, but their overuse has created resistant super bugs and the emergence of deadly infections like MRSA. Why is there no public debate about the overuse of immunizations? Read the rest of my commentary, published Monday in the Roanoke Times HERE.

10. Only in Floyd: A recent ad I received for the April issue of The Museletter(our homespun local newsletter), reads “There is a riot in my barn. You are invited. Bring the children and come see 10 baby goats jump and twist in the air, play king of the mountain on an old radiator, or just nurse and snuggle. Just call-the tour is free.”

11. Even though a number of Americans are still confused by the Bush administration’s rhetoric implying that Iraq played a role in 9/11 or had some connection to al Qaida, the world is not confused, so says a new bipartisan report : Thanks in part to the Iraq war, the next U.S. president — Republican or Democrat, black or white, man or woman — will take office with America's power, prestige and popularity in decline, according to bipartisan reports, polls and foreign observers. "Since 9/11, the United States has been exporting fear and anger rather than the more traditional values of hope and optimism. Suspicions of American power have run deep," Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state under Bush, and Joseph Nye, a Pentagon official under President Clinton, wrote in a December report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Read the full article HERE.

12. I was recently relieved to be reminded that thinking is still a valuable commodity when I heard Wayne Dyer on PBS, explaining why he didn’t have to help his son register for college, say, “I’m a prophet. I get paid by the thought.”

13. My St. Patrick’s Day Scrabble poem using the words in our game ends like this: Color the blank tiles green … Aim the K in Patrick … on a triple letter score … and the Q in quean on the star … Free lookups for everyone …who can spell the sunshine back into the sky … who play to win more fun!

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Posted by Colleen at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. I’ve come to accept that I’m never going to remember how to spell words like Renaissance and restaurant on my own, no matter how many times I write or type them.

2. Intriguing old Appalachian country names recently discovered and added to the list I keep: Men - Burnace, Vent, Talmadge, Enoch, and Elinos. Women – Effie, Colba, Hava, Arminda, and Hettie.

3. I keep wondering if my sons are related to Harold Copus, the private detective Dr. Phil’s uses for his show. He has the same last name as them and does bear a resemblance to their father’s family, who are English.

4. “Hello?” It was Mara. I said, “My answering machine is full so I was forced to answer the phone. It says FL which is either means FULL or Florida.” “It could mean Floyd,” she answered.

5. Can you fill THIS page without smiling?

6. As a lover of the ocean who grew up in a beach town in the 60’s and now lives in the mountains, I could be considered a peacenik beachnik.

7. I dreamt my son JOSH’s name while I was pregnant with him. It was spelled out in bold black magic marker. My youngest son is named DYLAN. We were living in Texas at the time and people there kept thinking it was Dillion, but I was thinking poets, Bob and Thomas.

8. A beachnick without a beach is like a beatnik who can’t write poetry.

9. Makes me want to cry: My first mother in law sent me THIS tribute to Paragon Park, the amusement park in the town I grew up in that was torn down in the early 80’s to make room for Condos. HERE is my blog post tribute.

10. Strange keyword search phrases that landed some people on my site this week: spark notes somewhere between life and death, I didn’t come all the way to loose poem keywords, birthday poems for grown sons, and maggots blown into yard on leaves

11. Joe was recently reading me something written by a psychologist named Havighurst. Of course, all I hear and all I can see when I look at that name is “Havinghurts," which seems an appropriate name for a psychologist.

12. Will pharmaceuticals be the new second hand smoke? The more people take drugs the more traces of them end up in the water the rest of us drink. What would George Orwell think?

13. Number 72 in my “100 Things About Me” says: I found my first 4 leaf clover at a library book sale, pressed between the pages of a book that cost 25 cents.” The name of the book was “What’s in a Name?”

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Posted by Colleen at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (37)

1. Look what was right under my nose. After seeing a yard full of plastic lawn flamingo and going back later to get a picture but finding they were gone, the following day I went to play scrabble and found these in the Cafe Del Sol window box doing THIS.

2. Flamingos are to the south what penguins are to the north.

3. I recently looked at youtube videos of flamingos the way I imagine some people get sucked into porn. I watched for much longer than I intended and felt dirty afterwards, learning that the birds are endangered, overcrowded in places, being shot at by some, and trained as exhibits in zoos.

4. Experienced counsel recently given to my overbooked husband on how to pace himself: “Do only what’s right in front of you. Take one step at a time,” I said. He answered, “Yeah, but the difference between me and you is that my legs are longer.”

5. A Fragment From my Friend Fred: Does it matter at all to you that the next president has a clue about the world beyond politics? If so, consider another candidate than John McCain. Let his record speak for itself. From the Sierra Club… Washington, D.C.–In the 2007 National Environmental Scorecard released today by the League of Conservation Voters, John McCain receives a score of ZERO. McCain was the only member of Congress to skip every single crucial environmental vote scored by the organization, posting a score lower than Members of Congress who were out for much of the year due to serious illnesses–and even lower than some who died during the term. By contrast, the average Member of Congress scored a 53 in 2007. McCain posts a lifetime score of only 24.

6. Floyd has an Earth Day website HERE.

7. I once said: “If no one is going to quote me, I’ll quote myself. Is that a quote?” Looks like somebody does want to quote me – and other bloggers too. See HERE.

8. I actually have a poem with the word flamingo in it: The birds are back … checking out the real estate … a high-rise nest … on my porch rafter … a one room shelter … inaccessible to cats … with southern exposure … and a landing deck … The rest, with the flamingo part is HERE.

9. Current favorite word, besides flamingo: rigamarole

10. Strangest spam message this week: Frankly, the way things are right now, I'm not sure I'd want to play myself in my very own movie of the week.

11. “Hello.” It was Mara. I said, “My answering machine is full so I was forced to answer the phone. It says FL which is either means FULL or Florida," I said to her. “It could mean Floyd,” she answered.

12. Recently said by Colleen to Joe: Life is just one big field trip that I’m taking good notes on.

13. Floyd’s Own American Idol. She made it to the top 50. Read more HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)

1. I was recently sick and hadn’t been out in over a week. I was beginning to think I should make a dentist appointment just to get out of the house.

2. Strangest thing recently seen: At a training this past Saturday,related to the work I do with adults with disabilities, I went to the bathroom at the break and saw an hourglass egg timer on the back of the toilet. I’m still curious about it.

3. I had a hard time sitting and paying attention for the four hour training so I doodled and worked on my teapoems, which reminded me of scribbling poetry on scraps of paper many years ago when I worked at a factory. I still remember writing this line then: Bob Dylan had the highway blues … he wore pointed shoes …and kept his guitar always loaded.

4. Sometimes I run my fingers across the keyboard and pretend that it’s a piano.

5. I’ve never played an instrument, unless you want to count the diggeredo, which is a long hollow bamboo instrument you blow into. It sounds something like the sound of blowing into a conch shell, unless you’re not doing it right and then it just sounds like farting.

6. I now have a Hewitt Packard Case Manager, a nice guy named John who sent me a new printer when my old one got fried even though my year warranty was expired by one day. I guess the company thinks I’m a special case, either that or they want to keep my buying their ink cartridges, which cost about as much to refill as the cost of the original printer.

7. This was my favorite Academy Award acceptance speech, given by Alex Gibney who won for his documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, about an Afghan taxi driver who was falsely imprisoned and then killed: Truth is, I think my dear wife Anne was kind of hoping I'd make a romantic comedy, but honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition that simply wasn't possible. This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let's hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light.

8. I also liked Daniel Day Lewis’s acceptance speech for his best actor award. He began by thanking the academy for “whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town.” Then he said that his character “sprang like a golden sapling out of the mad beautiful head” of the movie’s writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson. Leave it to an Irishman to utter such poetry.

9. Classiest moment of the night: Although many of the thank you speeches were boring and I kept waiting for a streaker to liven things up, I loved it when host John Stewart brought best song co-writer back on the stage after a commercial break to say what she wanted to into the mic after the orchestra had initially cut her off.

10. Said with needles in my back to my acupuncturist: “I feel like a birthday cake.” I had just had moxa on my back (something like having a lit cigar held near your skin to improve the flow of energy) so was feeling a little lit up. “I’ll be back soon to blow you out,” my acupuncturist joked as he left the treatment room.

11. My poet friend Mara sent me THIS link to a ‘what kind of punctuation mark are you’ quiz. I came out a colon. “Well, at least it’s a committed form of punctuation, unlike the semi-colon,” I told her. And LOOK what Bonnie just posted on semi-colons. Seems you can get a lot of attention for using one correctly.

12. To celebrate Leap Year Brian Feldman, a performance artist from Florida, is going to do 366 12 foot leaps for 24 hours on February 29th.

13. Apparently, his blog is a performance piece as well.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (34)

1. Valentine’s Day Morning: He replaced the belt on the vacuum cleaner for me. I left him a pink valentine bag on the kitchen table the night before with a card and a Sunkist naval orange inside. He responded by leaving me a conversation candy heart that said, “Call Me.”

2. When the phone rings, instead of cringing and thinking ‘who could be calling me now,’ I’ve decided to pretend it’s the citizens clearing house telling me I’ve won a million dollars. Even though I never signed up for the prize, I’ve decided to pretend it’s true because I want to change some of my habitual negative thought patterns and replace them with enthusiastic ones.

3. I spent a good part of Valentine’s Day sick in bed with the phone, going through my speed dial to tell the people on it that I loved them.

4. I only got as far as three calls, which was a big deal for me since I’m practically phone phobic.

5. I can trace my aversion to phones back to when I was a girl. When boys I liked would call to talk to me, I would sit on the other end of the line frozen with nothing to say. But not liking to talk on phones also runs in my family.

6. I don’t like watching sports either, unless my sons are playing in them.

7. I don’t use white sugar so I never have it in the house. But I collect sugar packets from gas stations and fast food places so I have some on hand for when company comes.

8. When we first moved into our Blue Ridge Parkway cabin, fifteen years ago, our neighbor actually asked to borrow a cup of sugar. My kids were mortified that we had no sugar to offer him. I tried to convince him to try honey. He’s never tried to borrow anything since.

9. A poem I wrote twenty five years ago that my sister Sherry, a nurse, hung on the bulletin board where she worked is called Remedy and goes like this: Take two poems … and a trip to the ocean … call me in the morning … Plenty of fluids … and funny business … 3 Hail Mary’s and a hug … Take lots of music … as you need it …dance 3X a day … follow your own directions … watch your children play … Now bless your stars and tell me something nice …. call me in the morning …or call me at night.

10. I used to preface things I wanted to remember with “Note to self.” Now I’m at the point where I have to say “Note to self … in writing.”

11. Joe calls up to the computer room at night where I’m working, “Are you almost done?” “I’ll be down in a minute. I’m just admiring my blog," I answer.

12. The “Call Me” conversation heart Joe left on the table on Valentine’s Day morning sounded more like THIS rather than THIS.

13. Candy hearts are to Valentines Day what candy corn is to Halloween. 13 Messages After the Beep are HERE.

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Posted by Colleen at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. A haiku a day keeps the “roses are red violets are blue” blues away.

2. Where do poems come from? Some lines just come and you follow them. Others you have to dig.

3. I use to wonder when I’d be too old to sit on the sidewalk. Now I know it’s when you can’t get back up. I learned this recently while I was dealing with a bad back.

4. What I haven’t mentioned until now is that on the same day that Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama’s Roanoke speaking engagements were cancelled due to high winds, brush fires spreading, and the Roanoke airport closing, we had an electrical fire in our computer room caused by a broken lamp that was still plugged in and a surge of electricity. The fire alarm probably saved our house but the room is covered with a layer of white 9/11-like fire extinguisher dust and smells like a toxic waste dump.

5. I went to the Hillary pre-primary rally (which was ultimately cancelled) with my friend Mara. At first I was hesitant about going. I had to be reminded about the significance of Hillary being the first female candidate to get this far, and I was still upset about her vote for the Iraq war. But Mara knows how to get me to go anywhere with her. All she has to say is, “Don’t you want to blog about it?”

6. From Thirteen Thursday February 2005: My first act of guerilla graffiti with my new label gun was to print up labels on bright red tape saying “I love you” and then stick them on certain people’s briefcases, cars, cards and such. I’ve decided that my graffiti tag is XOXO.

7. My new favorite word: frippery. Frappe is pretty good too.

8. I’ve always gotten the words bizarre and bazaar mixed up, probably because Bostonians pronounce them the same.

9. Probably the only Beatle’s song I never liked was the one called Revolution Number 9 in which someone repeats over an over “Number 9 ... Number 9 ... Number 9 ... Number 9."

10. When I was a little girl I used to tell my dad that I loved him 60. I guess it was the biggest number I knew.

11. Have you ever noticed that road speed limits match the speed of life? When you’re young time passes slow from 0 -20 mph. 45 mph is pretty comfortable, like middle age. At 55 life starts going pretty fast and after 65 it all pretty much whizzes by.

12. A clock is a man-made orbit … that paces its own cage … Round like a planet … made in its image … A mechanical nightingale of gilded numbers … is an excerpt from a poem I once performed with a troupe called Women of the 7th Veil. We did improv dance to Dave Matthew’s “Two Step” while the poem was being read. Let the clock stop … It’s hypnotic talk … Let the clock stop … Let it stop … Let it stop … Turn it off.

13. Watch time STOP at Grand Central Station HERE. .

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. The first photo is one I took at the cancelled Hillary rally of hannel 13 interviewing an attendee.

Posted by Colleen at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (37)

1. I’ve been pruning little tea poems … origami notes … petals of the Orient …light enough to float.

2. I’ve also been expressing myself with valentines via conversation heart generators (like THIS one). See the heart I made for my friend Bonnie below.

3. Recently said to my sister Sherry while expressing my happiness that she regularly visits Loose Leaf: My blog is a mass produced love letter that I send out every day!

4. After writing THIS poem about Jesus as a graffiti artist, more lines have been coming, like this: Jesus is left handed and afraid of heights … I guess it’s what novelists mean by “character development.”

5. I recently read a blog post about basketball and left a comment saying: Basketball is so over my head. (I'm 5 foot 1 inch).

6. As for the Super Bowl, I should have been rooting for the home team, but besides Tom Petty I didn’t even know who was playing.

7. Speaking of sports, in the last few days I’ve spent a good bit of time laying on pool balls and rubbing a golf ball across my foot in lieu of needles as per the order of my acupuncturist who is treating me for a back problem.

8. I was shocked to hear HERE that rabid right winger Ann Coulter would not only vote for Hillary Clinton over John McCain, she says she would campaign for her if John McCain wins the Republican presidential nomination.

9. Coulter thinks Hillary is more conservative than McCain. What does Hillary think of that? Her reaction HERE says it all.

10. Chelsea Adams, a Radford University professor of writing, has been coming to our spoken word open mics. After she recently read some poems about her love of coffee from her chapbook called Java Poems, Sally, the café owner, challenged the poets present to write coffee haiku for a future event. I told her I would use my poetic license to write about tea instead and that I probably wouldn’t be counting the number of syllables in lines. Even so, many of my teapoems from the series I’m working on have morphed into haiku in spite of myself.

11. The morphing of my teapoems into haiku reminds me of how I had no idea how to talk with an Irish accent until I read Angela’s Ashes aloud to my youngest son and suddenly found myself reading with a thick Irish brogue, which I can still do at a moment’s notice.

12. Somehow these two quotes go together (not because they were both said by Johns) and express my relief to be writing more poetry than prose this past week: Dancing is the poetry of the foot. ~John Dryden. Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. ~John Wain

13. My love of writing little sips of poetry has led me to a new fascination with one line poems. This one by William Matthews is one of my favorites: “Premature Ejaculation”: I’m sorry this poem’s already finished.

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Posted by Colleen at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. Haiku is the bonsai of poetry.

2. If coffee was music it would be salsa and tea would be a flute.

3. I have a friend name Phil who plays the harmonica. I want to take a picture of him playing so I can name it the “Philharmonic.”

4. I recently joked to my husband that he wakes up like a gymnast. He literally bounces out of bed. Me? Not so much.

5. Whenever I speak of “Doug my server” I feel like calling him Hal from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey because he knows so much more about the outerspace of bloggness than I do, and I feel like I could get thrown over board at anytime.

6. Once when my brother-in-law was visiting us here in Virginia, we were at a restaurant and he asked for an order of chicken wings, but with his thick Boston accent, “order” sounded like “oughta,” and the waitress thought he was asking for “otter,” which of course was not on the menu.

7. Putting up a new post is like bait if you’re fishing for comments.

8. Check out THIS very entertaining trailer for the novel The Liar’s Diary, which my blog friend Patry (who I last blogged about HERE) wrote. She has been recovering from surgery related to cancer and has not been able to promote her book’s paperback release, so a group of bloggers got together and have been doing it for her. More about that HERE and HERE.

9. Some of my photos of downtown Floyd are posted on the Floyd Fest site HERE.

10. Taking pictures is fun partly because the ones you think will come out good often don’t and the ones you expect to be bad often aren’t.

11. I’ve never wanted to be on a game show, Survivor, Dr. Phil, or American Idol. But I DO want to be on THIS, my favorite new TV show, called Just for Laughs. It makes me laugh so hard I fall off the bed, unlike my husband who jumps.

12. I don’t want to be the lady buying fresh fish in the video. I want to be one of the butchers. But if I was the lady, I’d be taking photos and notes so that I could blog about it later.

13. I’m game for it all…except I probably couldn’t bring myself to do THIS.

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Posted by Colleen at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (31)

1. Overnight my hair reaches critical mass and I can’t go another day without a haircut.

2. Sometimes I find myself in front of the computer and I don’t know how I got here.

3. People like me who regularly burn food need a whistle on ever pot and pan in the house like the one on my tea kettle.

4. For the whole thirty minute drive to Christiansburg for my haircut I composed little sips of poems about tea, like this one: Basic black … fills an ample white pot … Tea-ball chain dangles … like a necklace on a queen.

5. I regret that when I was in high school, I never wore my hair in a ponytail. I wanted to. I wanted to look bouncy and fun like the teenagers on American Bandstand. Cheerleaders wore ponytails. So did Gidget. Read the rest and see a photo of my high school class picture in which I’m not wearing a pony tail HERE.

6. It seems that the Red Sox aren’t the only ones who have been cursed in Boston, and when it comes to presidential campaigns JFK is like Babe Ruth.

7. I’m still convinced that the Red Sox finally won the World Series for the first time after 86 years because most of the players had long hair (think Sampson).

8. I just this minute realized that curse and cures is the same word.

9. You can test your vocabulary while also donating rice through The United Nations to help end world hunger HERE.

10. Leah, the girl behind A Girl Named Guy, recently posted a podcast about her April visit to Floyd that features some familiar Floyd faces. A Girl Named Guy is a multi-media company that offers tools for positive living to conscious consumers. On TV. On the web. In print, their website says. Check it out HERE.

11. How do you look up a word when you don’t know how to spell it? Or maybe you can spell it but don’t know how to pronounce it. Check out THIS talking dictionary I found at Shepherd’s Alley.

12. About that thing I said last week: “I’m not good at telling jokes or lies, which may be why I don’t write fiction.” The truth is I just don’t have a good enough imagination to write fiction. Last Thursday Amy the Black at Creekistan did “13 Things You May Find Yourself Saying in the Future” with lines like: "That was a really good steak. See if you can get the Chef to give us a DNA sample," or "I’m going to Walmart for the sex-change surgery, again" – to which I commented, “You have a really good imagination. Is there a pill for that yet?”

13. Please don’t try THIS at home. It makes my hair stand on end.

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Posted by Colleen at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. We didn’t wear tie dye in the 60’s. Paisley, Nehru jackets, Mexican ponchos, bell bottoms, beads, big floppy hats, and batik prints, yes; but not tie dye.

2. Although no one I knew ever said “groovy,” we did say “Wow” a lot. We said bummed out, ripped off, screwed up, and wiped out. We said hairy, heavy, crash, drag, cool, have a ball or a blast, and blow your mind; most of which we still say today.

3. My husband was home from work sick one day last week. Concerned I would catch what he had when we woke up he asked me how I felt. “I never feel good when I wake up. I could be sick and not even know it,” I answered.

4. Recently Shepherd posted a “hassle me” generator meant for those who want to be reminded of their New Year’s resolutions. I thought we should give equal time to a “compliment me” generator, so I sent him THIS, which when I first clicked on it, it said to me: "You have lovely timing.”

5. Another one HERE, called the surrealist complimenter said: I love your eyes, but only with ketchup.

6. After seeing a post about The Bodies Exhibit on somebody’s blog, I recalled a few years back when a group of us from Floyd saw photographer’s Frank Cordelle’s impressive Century Project exhibit in Blacksburg. It’s a "chronological series of nude photographic portraits of more than one hundred women and girls from the moment of birth to nearly a hundred years of age. A diverse group of photographs comprising women of many ages, shapes, sizes, and life experiences is presented in this exquisitely disarming project. Most of the images are accompanied by moving statements written by the women themselves.”

7. I’m not good at telling jokes or lies, which may be why I don’t write fiction.

8. Although I think truth is stranger and more interesting than fiction, I don’t enjoy many biographical movies because I’d rather see the documentary.

9. Most people don’t realize that it takes energy to be able to fall asleep and that people who are exhausted rarely sleep well. The lowest point I have occasionally reached in my issues with fatigue is when I’m too tired to get a massage. It takes energy to receive one.

10. My favorite word carved in cement is on Draper St. in Blacksburg and is the word “Word.”

11. Said to my friend Mara during a recent phone conversation where I was complaining about not writing much poetry these days: Writing poetry is like knitting and writing prose is like using a sewing machine.

12. The drug pushers are at it again: Mara recently received a notice in the mail that she had an opportunity to win a free IPOD if she and her daughter got a flu shots (which still contain mercury, second only to uranium in toxicity). The deal also came with a guilt trip that said, “Others are counting on you. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.”

13. Going out to hunt last night, after coming home empty handed the last time he did, Joe says, “I’m going to give it another shot.”

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. This is my 116th TT.

Posted by Colleen at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

1. I just recently figured out – while dressing in front of the woodstove on a frigid morning – why the character in “Twas the Night before Christmas” slept with a cap on. He was cold.

2. I’m so glad I live in a place where you still see smoke coming out of chimneys.

3. Worlds most bizarre statues via lifecrusier Here.

4. World’s most unlikely friendship HERE. (Both this and #3 are really worth looking at.)

5. Do you ever get the feeling on a slow day that everyone has given up blogging as a new year’s resolution?

6. I just love this, by Ani Difranco: "So I walk like I'm on a mission, 'cuz that's the way I groove. I've got more and more to do, I've got less and less to prove. It took me too long to realize that I don't take good pictures 'cuz I have the kind of beauty that moves..." Read about Ani at Floyd Fest HERE.

7. Watching the presidential primary coverage recently I realized that there’s a part of me that doesn’t trust anyone running for President. Why would anyone want that much power and stress?

8. Watching the PBS show “Pioneers in Televison,” I noticed that the men being interviewed – Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffin – looked much better than the woman being interviewed – Mary Tyler Moore and Marlo Thomas – because the men hadn’t had plastic surgery.

9. I have the kind of husband who doesn’t notice for weeks if I hang a new picture or change the curtains. But he notices what counts right away, like when I get a new bra.

10. Someone on the Diane Rehm show yesterday referred to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as poetry vs. prose.

11. I’m starting a favorite word list. So far I have: Baffled, lollygag, discombobulated, pesto, and muffin. What’s yours?

12. Wearing my new beet red shiny silk pajamas that my husband gave me for Christmas, I say, “I feel like present.” He answers, “And your smile is the bow."

13. The days are shorter and we sleep more in winter. So how does anything get done?

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Posted by Colleen at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

1. We hadn’t recovered from our rowdy community Thanksgiving game of Celebrity, in which I spelled Carl Yastrzemski’s name wrong and didn’t know who Doris Lessing, was, so for Christmas we played Taboo. How Carl Yastrzemski fits into my life is HERE.

2. Why does food always taste better when eaten over the stove directly out of the pan?

3. I got invited to a New Years Eve party in part because the host knew I could be counted on to get some dancing started.

4. "Is it casual or glitter?" I asked him.

5. Ingredients for a good story, or things that make my job as storyteller easier: 1. have a webpage or a brochure where I can get some background. 2. Invite me to immerse myself in a related activity. 3. Give me a few fresh quotes. ... Mix well and pour.

6. How a poem is like cake: Don’t use a mix or stale ingredients … Don’t look in the oven too much when it’s cooking … or eat too much at one sitting … Don’t over-sweeten or over-stir … A baker and a poet are both concerned with flavor … It’s all about consistency and knowing when it’s done.

7. Norman Mailer who died this year said, “When you write a book you try to create a spell. You either succeed or you don’t.”

8. Bevery Sills, who also died this year, said, “When I look back over my life I would rather say ‘I shouldn’t have done that’ than ‘I should have done that.”’

9. The closest chance there is that I could vote Republican HERE.

10. I didn’t end up going to the party. I spend the better part of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day avoiding starting a story I had signed up to write. By the afternoon of New Year’s Day, I finally got started. It’s about a thirteen year old homeschooled girl who composes her own electronica music and has produced two CDs. Coming soon ...

11. Dressing in front of the woodstove, which I had to do this morning because it was so cold, is like taking a shower where you have to keep turning to get the warm heat on you, section by section. I’d much rather take a bath, like I’d rather it was summer.

12. My crazy window smashing cardinal came back, waking me up too early with its futile attempts scaring away its own reflection. Right now I have a 20 inch plastic owl in one window and a 20 inch Folk Art Santa in the other. So far it’s working.

13. “A new year is like a birthday. It takes me awhile to get used to the number and to embrace it.” I said that.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. This is my 114th TT.

Posted by Colleen at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (28)

1. My youngest son Dylan and his wife, Alexis, are expecting a baby in May. I can’t seem to say the words grandmother or grandchild yet (my first!), so I’m calling the baby my G-Whiz kid.

2. I told them that I would come down to Roanoke where they live to baby-sit whenever I can. The only two things I require are an internet connection and a baby stroller.

3. I lean towards believing there is a rhyme to the reason of life, but other times I think it’s all free verse.

4. I almost forgot how to blog over the Christmas holiday. Finally the evening of the day after Christmas I started to visit my blog friends again to see what they had been up to, sort of like when we were kids and would walk around the neighborhood the day after Christmas to see what kind of presents our friends had got.

6. Sometimes even my husband has to catch up with what’s going with me by reading my blog, especially when he’s in San Francisco helping to facilitate a teen meditation retreat like he is right now. XO.

7. My oldest son, Josh, and I just watched the Martin Scorsese's documentary, “No Direction Home,” about Bob Dylan. We had a good laugh remembering the time when Josh was 13 and I tried to turn him on to Dylan by tuning into a show he was on. It was during the phase when Dylan’s singing was shot and he garbled a song as I explained what an icon he was. Josh thought I was out of my mind. “Maybe he’s trying act like singing bad is the new good singing,” I said referring to the rebel trendsetter aspect of Dylan.

8. I was happy to find two of my all time favorite Bob Dylan songs in one Youtube video HERE, but I did have to wonder about Dylan’s choice of hat because it looks more like something Camilla Parker Bowles would wear.

9. Speaking of hats, my blogging friend Paul has a hat blog and I’m featured today wearing the leopard skin pillbox hat inspired by a third favorite Dylan song and by Deana at Friday Night Fish Fry (who really has one whereas I was only trying mine on). See HERE.

10. I wish President Bush would have an affair … I wish he'd take off his black pointed cowboy boots ... and look at the moon more often … And then I wish he'd wake up … and be inflicted with what Jim Carey had … in the movie "Liar Liar" … My Dream For President Bush poem is scheduled to be broadcast on The Monitor, KPFT/Pacifica, in Houston on Sunday from 6 pm to 7 pm CST. The host of the show must have found the poem on the internet. The roster of past guests on the show is impressive and includes: Daniel Ellsberg, Molly Ivins, Seymour Hersh, Arianna Huffington, Helen Thomas, Gore Vidal, William Rivers Pitt, Howard Zinn, Scott Ritter and others. You can read the rest of the poem HERE and HERE is the radio show’s website.

11. I’m a new Sufjan Stevens fan. I discovered him when I went to Blue Mountain Mama's site and she had several Christmas songs of his downloaded on her blog. My favorite is called “The Worst Christmas Ever.” You can hear him sing it HERE.

12. Christmas Caroling in Angels in the Attic Thrift Shop by some of my Floyd friends is HERE.

13. Is it possible to play anything but a happy song with a banjo? Do you know what the difference is between a fiddle and a violin?

Post notes: Thirteen Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. This is my 113th TT. The photo above is of my son Dylan’s stepdaughter coloring at our house on Christmas Day.

Posted by Colleen at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)

1. I have a fantasy poetry troupe called The Beat Mix, a play on the word beatniks.

2. My poem in which a blender figures in prominently is HERE.

3. Santa has a blog HERE. “One Hundred Things About Santa” is HERE.

4. My Asheville potter son, Josh, just got blogged by someone other than me HERE.

5. I wonder what kind of scrambled eggs eggnog would make.

6. I love the idea of hats but think of them more as props than clothes.

7. A blatant typo in the middle of a post that sits there for days before I see it is equivalent or worse than going to high school with a big zit on your face.

8. I sneeze loudly, yawn loudly, and stomp up the stairs loudly. Last night in bed I tossed and turned so loudly that I woke myself up.

9. I feel discriminated against when it comes to bathrobes. I like pink as much as the next girl, but I want a new terrycloth bathrobe and all the women’s ones are in pale pastel colors. A pale colored robe wouldn’t last a week with me before it was covered in grime and stains. Why do men get all the dark vibrant blue, green, and purple colors?

10. I was up bright and early on Monday morning to roll a guy whose midriff was showing around on a floor and blow air into a dummy. Can you guess what I was doing?

11. “Colleen, do you know how Christmas came to be called X-mas?” my friend Chris recently asked. “I don’t know, but I hope it doesn’t mean something like X-husband.” Of course, I was googling X-mas as soon as I could get my hands on a computer and discovered that: “The word "Christ" and its compounds, including "Christmas,” have been abbreviated for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern "Xmas" was commonly used. “Christ" was often written as "XP" or "Xt"; there are references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as far back as 1021 AD.

12. I also found out that eggnog adopted the nog part of its name from the word noggin, a Middle English phrase used to describe a small, wooden, carved mug used to serve alcohol in.

13. I use my real name on my blog because why would I want my alter ego instead of the real me to be the one to benefit from all the great friendships, connections, and opportunities that come via blogging ?

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here. This is my 112th TT.

Posted by Colleen at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (36)

1. What’s up with hunters that wear camouflage clothes, topped off with a bright blaze orange hat? Do they want to be seen or not?

2. I can tell it’s Christmas when I drive by a bunch of tires holding a tarp over hay bales and mistake them for wreaths.

3. At the book signing event I attended last weekend, I was snapping a photo of David St. Lawrence with his camera while he was instructing me how to use it. “Hold it like you would a gun,” he said. “Yeah, like I've ever held a gun!” I answered.

4. I want President Bush to have a dream like the one that Ebenezer Scrooge had… I want him to be haunted by the ghosts of Iraqi children who cry out … But mankind is your business … After I posted my “Dream for President Bush” poem last week (written in November 2002) it got picked up at Crooks and Liars, creating an increase of email comments and traffic on my blog. The last time I checked over there it had 152 comments. Half a dozen other political blogs also picked it up.

5. Dicken’s Christmas Carol is to Christmas what Arlo Guthrie’s Alice Restaurant is to Thanksgiving.

6. Politically correct Santa can’t smoke a pipe anymore, and there’s talk of him having to lose weight and not saying HO HO because some people think it sounds too much like the slang for “Whore.” On top of that, I saw a story on the nightly news a few nights ago about people making trips to the North Pole to see it before it’s gone.

7. The fact that Joy is in the word Jolly is not lost on me.

8. Could sputtering be an alternate plural of puttering the way slack could be for lack, or the way pets can become pests when there are too many of them?

9. Another sign of global warming: Joe and I raking leaves on Sunday instead of shoveling snow.

10. Does passion fruit flirt? Are elderberries old? Have you ever poured a watermelon and drank it by the gallon? So I brought my Fruit Loops poem to my writer’s workshop. After reading it out loud, one of the members joked, “What has happened to you?” The group renamed the poem “A Slamming Fruit Jam.” I was reminded that I left out persimmons and someone wondered if a pumpkin should be considered a fruit. I rewrote the ending HERE. (And yes, June, I will be reading it at the Spoken Word Open Mic this Saturday at the Café Del Sol.)

11. Apparently, Carly Simon revealed to Dick Ebersol who she was singing about in the song “You’re So Vain.” Ebersol won a lunch with Carly Simon in an auction for charity in which she agreed to reveal who it was. She allowed him to give the rest of us one clue. He has an E in his name. Believe it or not I learned about this while researching fruit for the poem mentioned above because. And if you know the words to the song you will know what fruit was mentioned in the song.

12. Have you ever noticed that whenever Oprah breaks for a commercial and she says “We’ll be right back,” she always says it twice?

13. Have you ever noticed that whenever Oprah breaks for a commercial and she says “We’ll be right back,” she always says it twice?

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (32)

1. My hands slipped while writing an email to my blog friend and fellow poet, Pris, and I called her Prism, which I think is appropriate seeing as how she sees the world through a poet’s eye.

2. Once I pointed out to a friend that by adding a G to her last name “Robinson” it would become “Robinsong.” She changed her name.

3. At one time we had THIS poster of Bob Marley in our living room. Both my mother and my friend Alywn thought it was Joe the first time they saw it.

4. I’d be really sad if Willie Nelson ever cut off his braid.

5. In the first year of Joe’s and my relationship I had a hard time saying “I love you.” Not because I didn’t but because it seemed cliché to say, and it didn’t seem to cover what I was feeling. Eventually I was able to say, I’m so loving you.

6. I can tell Christmas is nearing when my stat counter says I have a visitor from Santa Clara but I read it as “Santa Claus.”

7. My friend Rosemary sent me an email asking if we could get together for Scrabble. I answered, “Let me check the master plan, aka my calendar.”

8. It’s gotten so cold lately that we’ve had to batten down the hatches, which in our case means the doggie door.

9. Such is the life of a poet: I spent a good part of the day yesterday looking at pinwheel videos and writing a poem about fruit in which one line says: What’s a apricot got that a kumquat does not?

10. I believe in the bluebird of happiness, I just haven’t seen one in awhile.

11. I got a holiday invitation that ended by saying, “google for directions.” All I could think of is what I would have thought if I got that same message 5 years ago.

12. The root of the word GOOGLE comes from “googol,” a very large number that looks something like THIS. 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, etc….. Or better yet because my hand is getting tired: THIS

13. And THIS is the shape of things to come. Make of it what you will.

Post notes: If # 13 is down try THIS one, compliments of Smiler. Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (28)

1. Well, you must tell me, baby … How your head feels under somethin' like that … Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat … Well, you look so pretty in it … Honey, can I jump on it sometime? … Yes, I just wanna see … If it's really that expensive kind … You know it balances on your head … Just like a mattress balances … On a bottle of wine … Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat … ~ Bob Dylan

2. Sometimes when I’m out shopping I have a terrible feeling that one of Oprah’s makeover artists is going to come up and bust me for needing a new updated look.

3. Well it’s not really a pillbox and it’s not really mine, but I tried it on just for Deana.

4. When my scale tips towards 120 I jump up and down, not for joy but because I need to burn some calories.

5. Said to Joe while watching a PBS show on the history of the Rolling Stone Magazine: “I like to watch music specials of the Woodstock generation like my father watched WWII war shows.”

6. Also said to Joe, hanging up the phone after getting our credit card company to remove a 4 day past due $30 late fee with me complaining loudly in the background: “I guess I’m the bad cop and you’re the good one.”

7. A few nights after the Rolling Stone show, I died and went to heaven watching another PBS special. This one was Eric’s Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival with a line-up that included Jeff Beck, Robert Cray, BB King, John Meyer, Steve Winwood, Willie Nelson, Robby Robinson, and more. Even Bill Murray got in the act, opening the show singing Van Morrison’s Gloria. Have you contributed to your PBS Station lately?

8. “Hey, I just made an elf out of myself,” my sister Tricia wrote to the Love Link, our family email group. The subject line read “Here’s some non-stop belly laughs for you!” She was right. After watching HERS, we all made OUR OWN and spent hours emailing them back and forth.

9. After not knowing who Doris Lessing was when I drew her name playing “Celebrity” on Thanksgiving, I looked her up and enjoyed learning about her. She, a recent Nobel Prize winner in literature, doesn’t like to be labeled. She has been called a social activist, but what she says about that is this: “movements get taken over by hysterics.”

10. About religion she has said, "I'm so afraid of religion: its capacity for murder is terrifying.”

11. Some near life size views of downtown Floyd via Gary Boyd are HERE.

12. A Woman’s Lit Zine Online: I’m thrilled to be published in Della Donna’s December issue. Check it out HERE. My contribution is HERE.

13. Chunky, clunky, and funky: That’s how I recently described Josh’s old Isuzu truck, which I was forced to drive when he took Joe’s truck back to Asheville in order to transport the log splitter and then Joe went out of town with my car. The description came when Joe called to ask if I made it home alright. It has over 200,000 miles, no power steering and is just plain JUNKY! But it runs.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (34)

1. I used to keep a journal just for writing what I was thankful for. This is an entry written on the fall Equinox of 1998: I looked at the trees upside down. I looked at a horse close-up. I saw the moon misshapen, jumped on the trampoline, and watched a star bounce in and out of a tree branch. I lit a candle and watched it flicker. I longed for pansies and writing letters. I helped Dylan do his homework.

2. I feel all around better when I go over the things I was thankful that day before going to sleep. It’s usually the small things I remember.

3. This is the prayer I said every night as girl: God Bless Mommy, Daddy, Jimmy, Kathy, Colleen, Danny, Sherry, Johnny, Joey, Bobby, and Trish. Accompanying photo is HERE. My late brother Jimmy's Thanksgiving Birthday post HERE.

4. I’ve never used an ATM machine, played the Lottery, or a game of Frisbee. I have cooked a turkey before, but only a few times.

5. For the past 20 years, my family and I have been I sharing Thanksgiving with close friends at a community farm nearby. This year I’m bringing mashed rutabagas and potatoes, a six pack of beer, and two pies.

6. Last week I had the privilege of being a judge for an elementary school literary contest. My favorite written line (which was not part of the contest but something I saw hanging on the wall in the hall before I left) is still on my mind. It was written by an 8 year old boy and goes like this: “My sister’s name is Daisy. Of course, her favorite flower is Daisy. She likes rice too.”

7. As a blogger, when I’m involved in an event, I’m like a student who doesn’t do homework but listens well in class. Although I hate to disrupt the flow by taking notes, sometimes I do slip off and jot a few things down. But mostly I’m like my mother, a waitress who never wrote an order down, which is why I don’t know who the who THIS woman is cutting the ribbon at the Village Green Open House and standing next to Woody and the mayor.

8. Hearing THIS is a Thanksgiving tradition.

9. Tuesday I played Scrabble with Mara. It was the first time we have played since the summer. Referring to the toll all her schoolwork has had on her lately, she said, “My bread is recovered,” but she meant to say “My head is recovered,” so I guess it really wasn’t.

10. Mara told me that her daughter Kyla’s byline is “I like pie.”

11. I’m really thankful that I don’t have to set alarm clocks anymore.

12. When I write for myself, I don’t use punctuation like I don’t wear a bra to bed, which is why I had to add punctuation to the journal entry part of #1.

13. In the fall, the red zinnia of spring is replaced with the red of maple. Then comes the winter and the slate is wiped cleaned.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. The Grief Bond: The last time I played Scrabble with Mara (shown in the photo) we were setting up the board when she pulled out an old scorecard out of the box from a game I had won and handed it to me, thinking I would want to save it. “What, do you want me to frame it?” I asked, and then added, “No, better yet, let’s put it in my coffin when I die.” Few people besides me and Mara talk to each other like that. HERE is why.

2. I write an inch worth of poetry to Mara’s prolific yardstick.

3. My friend Virginia recently started a Scrabble game we were playing with a 7 letter Bingo play, spelling out TOILE_S. The three of us playing all saw TOILERS, but when Virginia’s husband stopped by, coming from a construction site project, he thought the word was TOILETS.

4. Recently I found an old journal from 1987, when Joe and I first got together. On one page I wrote a note to Joe that said: I love you cats and dogs.

5. Since I started blogging, all those pretty blank journals I’ve collected over the years really are blank.

6. Filthy rich? For a recent Sunday Scribblings prompt about money, Under the Microscope posted an entry about how filthy money really is. She wrote: When we were in college we did an experiment in microbiology class where we cultured the surface of coins in each of our own pockets. The results showed us emphatically that money was indeed filthy; covered with a multitude of germs and even included some germs we call pathogens.

7. I left a comment, saying: I must be poor because I hardly ever get colds. The truth is -- people worry so much about using public restrooms when they're really more likely to catch something in a hospital.

8. Flu Shot? None of my friends get them. At least that's what I figure since THIS was emailed to me by more than a few.

9. Recently said by Colleen while watching the news: Who needs bombs and guns when you can do what China is doing to us: Killing us with products.

10. Scribbled this week on a scrap of paper: Are you up-beat or beat-up?

11. THIS (thanks to Smiler) is more fun than the paint by numbers we used to do when we were kids. It brings out the inner finger painting child in me. I actually thought it was a blank space until my cursor fell on it. Click it to change color.

12. I call Floyd’s own Tom Ryan a satirist, but he refers to himself as a porch monkey. He’s been up to more Tom Foolery with the November issue of the Floyd Enquirer. Check it out HERE. His review of Floyd Bloggers, using the Cute Puppy Rating System is HERE.

13. Tom is currently a bartender at Floyd’s Pine Tavern. One of his latest Enquirer headlines reads “The Buddhism of Bartending: How May I Serve You?” He invites readers to the Tavern to hear the “live broadcast” and suggests they subscribe to The Floyd Inquirer because he has eyebrows better than Garrison Keillor.

Post Notes: The Spoken Word Open Mic is this Saturday at the Café Del Sol from 7-9. Read about past Open Mic’s HERE. Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

1. Talking to my blog friend Smiler about why I haven’t joined the NaNoWriMo writing project, in which bloggers write a novel in thirty days, posting an entry each day, I said: I write so much already that I do it in my sleep, and then there’s the part of me that still considers writing fiction a form of lying.

2. Whenever I ask a question in a comment on a blog I have the urge to say, “I’ll take my answer off the air.”

3. Telling time after losing an hour to daylight savings time is like being bilingual. In our bedroom the clock reads the new time and in the kitchen it’s old, and no matter where I am when I look at the clock, I have to translate one time to the other.

4. What does fall smell like, in one sentence, Fred recently asked at Fragments from Floyd. My answer: Fall smells like an apple crisp crust baking brown and crispy with warm wild apples steeping inside (even if I they are store bought apples this year SEE HERE).

5. THIS is me walking to the mailbox. Take some Dramamine and turn up your sound.

6. For THIS one, hold on to your hat.

7. It seems fitting that the word GOD is in GOLD.

8. And that menses and semen are the same words with the letters switched around. Note and tone are too.

9. Are you left brained, right brained, or a balance of both? Check out THIS dancer and see if you see her spinning clockwise or counter clockwise or both? It’s fascinating!

10. When I first showed the dancer to my husband he said, “I see her turning clockwise because that’s the way she IS going.” But I saw her spinning counterclockwise at the same time he was seeing here go clockwise. Eventually he did see her go both ways and got that she isn’t actually changing her direction. It’s an illusion and her direction is dependent on how you look at her.

11. "Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth." ~ Thomas Fuller.

12. Sometime when I’m writing poetry I squint my eyes while my brain searches for the right world. After I found myself squinting to make the dancer change direction, I wondered if squinting is a way for me to access my right brain functions.

13. In my last 13 Thursday I wrote about watching the campy 1958 movie The Blob on Halloween and how someone in the movie actually said “shucks.” “When’s the last time you heard that and what do you think they would say today instead?” I asked. The best answer came from Deana, who said: “I bet it would rhyme with shuck.”

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (45)

1. When something exciting happens and Joe hears me say, “Now that’s something to write home about!” he knows it means I’m going to blog about it.

2. Ever since I heard Bob Dylan sing “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat,” (HERE) I’ve wanted one, but don’t know if I’d be brave enough to wear it.

3. I JUST LOVE THIS stuff, found by way of Smiler. It looks like the posters I had hanging on my bedroom walls in the late 60’s, only this stuff is moving (I think) and my posters never moved (unless I was on something).

4. I must be working too hard. Not only did I go to bed with my glasses still on but when I rolled over onto them in the night I started to write this line in my head.

5. At one point while watching The Blob with Joe at the Hotel Floyd someone in the movie actually said “Shucks.” When’s the last time you heard that word and what do you think they would say today in a remake?

6. When I was a girl I once participated in a Halloween prank that involved throwing raw eggs. The kid I did it with later grew up to be the town police captain.

7. My pumpkin patch only produced the two pumpkins, shown in the photo above. The big one is the biggest I’ve ever grown and too heavy for me to lift on my own. I’m convinced that it used up all the soil nutrients and caused the other pumpkins plants to die.

8. Last year I held a Halloween Costume contest. I asked readers to guess which one was me of the four costumes pictured HERE. You can play the quick game and guess and then look HERE to see if you are right.

9. Although trick or treating only became popular in this country in the early 1950’s, it’s roots go back to late medieval practice of “souling,” when poor folk would go door to door, receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day. Here’s what the Wikipedia says about trick or treating: The custom had become firmly established in popular culture by 1952, when Walt Disney portrayed it in the cartoon Trick or Treat, Ozzie and Harriet were besieged by trick-or-treaters on an episode of their television show, and UNICEF first conducted a national campaign for children to raise funds for the charity while trick-or-treating.

10. I collect leaves in the fall the way I collect shells in summer.

11. Eulogoy for Fallen Leaves: Some die of natural causes … They drift to the ground and close their eyes … Leaving their perfectly unmarked bodies … scattered like photographs of my ancestors … I collect the ones that look familiar … I write their obituaries and bury them in books … Or I lay them out on the kitchen table … like old lace doilies at an open casket wake … The rest of this poem is HERE.

12. The only candy corn I saw this Halloween was the fall foliage on the Parkway, and because of the drought it isn’t as orange as it has been in years past.

13. THIS is my Halloween gift to everyone. I had to do it three times to find out what was inside. Have fun!

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

1. THIS is the song I’ve been dancing to two or three times a day. I may be stuck in the past but at least it’s not classic rock.

2. I’ve been dancing for a long time. Remember those wallet size high school senior pictures that we went around getting signed at the end of school? Beside the usual “good luck in the future” sentiments, many of my classmates wrote comments saying what a good dancer I was and remembering seeing me on the weekends at the Surf, the dance club in the beach town where we all grew up.

3. Sometimes blogging feels like playing spin the bottle and comments are like getting and giving kisses. I feel this especially when I visit Michele Agnew’s site on the weekends. Each weekend she hosts a blogger’s “meet and greet” in which you leave a comment before visiting the blogger that commented above you on the list. The next blogger to visit finds your name next on the list and visits your site. You never know whose site you will land on or who will end up at yours.

4. I’ve never seen a ghost in Floyd but Floyd now has a ghost tour and a book, “Strange Tales of Floyd County,” to accompany it. I recently ran into the woman who wrote the book in a spa in town. I was there doing an interview with the owner for a newspaper insert called “All About Her” and she was there getting a purple streak dyed in her hair.

5. Speaking of hair, check out THIS photo of some Floyd wildlife involving wigs.

6. You can see Dan Rather singing “What’s the Frequency Kenneth” HERE. And Michael Stipe singing when he had long hair (for those of you like me who like men with long hair) is HERE.

7. I have two sons. Growing up, one was like the tortoise and the other was like the hare, but both had trouble with coats. One was known to frequently lose his and the other wouldn’t wear them. To this day, when I see them I say, “Where’s your coat?” and “Aren’t you cold?”

8. Speaking of newscasters, occasionally they announce something that shocks me. I was shocked to recently hear that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are distant cousins in a similar way I was shocked the night they announced that diet soft drinks actually cause you to gain weight. That’s right; rats fed artificial sweeteners ate three times the calories of rats given sugar, which suggest that sugar-free foods might play a role in the nation's obesity epidemic, the authors of a study on artificial sweeteners said. See THIS and THIS.

9. My husband, Joe, is a counselor. The other night a friend asked me how he was doing. The conversation went like this:

He: How’s Joe? Is he practicing?”

Me: “You mean his martial arts?

He: “No, I mean counseling. Is he practicing?

Me: What do you mean practicing? He doesn’t practice; he does it for real.”

He: “No, I mean practicing, as in ‘does he have a practice?’

Me: “Oh.” Laugher ensued.

10. I spent a large part of the day yesterday walking around the house with stuff like a paper clip in one hand and two pennies in the other, trying to figure out where to put them. Sometimes it feels like I spend most of my life putting stuff in its place, fiiguring out new places to put stuff, or trying to find where I put stuff. I wonder if I have George Carlinitis.

11. Have you ever noticed how many things you do in exactly the same order or the same way everyday, like the way you shower or bath? Do you think this is true: The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half. ~Feodor Dostoevski

12. I’m very proud of the way the Hotel Floyd Writer’s Suite came out, a project a few of us from The Floyd Writer’s Circle worked on for most of the summer. The Hotel Floyd website now has a series of photos in flash rotation of each of the 14 themed rooms. You can check out the Writer’s Room HERE and click on the sidebar to view photos of all the rooms.

13. I haven’t come across anyone as funny as the Fruitcake Lady yet. But THIS – boy doing Will Ferrell doing President Bush – comes pretty close.

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are